This is what I call meta advice.
He makes most of the money now from persuading others starting a passive income side gig, for which he coincidentally has a starter pack to sale. While this might be a reliable income, it is in no means a template for other people to start a successful passive income business with a working business idea.
It's been repeatedly shown that the best alternative source of income is selling to people looking for alternative sources of income.
One extra level of indirection always solves everything.
Business idea: I can sell you a list of people who you can then pay to tell you how to make money on the internet!
Except for too many levels of indirection.
When there is a gold rush sell shovels.
The modern version of that is GPUs.
Or consulting…
If I cared I would probably start selling material on how to sell material on alternative income... I think that would still be mostly reasonable point of meta. Good thing for world is that I do not care enough.
It worked for Levi Strauss.
Well, I agree and disagree with this comment.
For a minority % for whom Django is the tech-choice, there indeed is a product being offered.
But for them, and the majority who might not choose Django, there is enough general-purpose advise in this essay.
Everything is meta.
Even a shower, a clean shave, and a well-tailored outfit can be classified as marketing / lead-gen / sales.
As can brushing your teeth :)
This is a fair general critique of a category of advice that I try hard not to fall into. It is true that I make a fair share of my income from a starter kit, but I tried quite hard to generalize my advice and only mentioned it in passing once or twice (and the only slide that really pushed it, I acknowledged it was a shameless plug).
If you read my writing[1], it will be clear that I've been documenting my journey in a probably-too-transparent way long before I had a product that benefited from getting exposure to other developers. This talk is mostly just a distillation of that knowledge, because I have graduated from "idiot figuring it out" to "experienced person who may be able to say something useful for beginners".
Also, for the record, I hate that starter kits became one of the trendy (and sleazy) products in this space, exactly because it generates reactions like this. I wrote about this last month[2], saying "They make the whole industry look bad, and make me feel like a grifter selling Pegasus, even though I have worked my ass off on it for 5+ years and think it’s great. Maybe a corollary to this point is that I kind of don’t like marketing in my industry anymore?"
Again, I think it's a fair general critique and a correct reaction to this type of advice, and also I hope that I didn't really do what you said if you read or watch the contents of the talk.
1. https://www.coryzue.com/writing/ 2. https://www.coryzue.com/writing/dec-2024/
I liked what you have shared. I am in similar position and tried to do the same as you but without success. So it is interesting to check what I can improve.
> This is what I call meta advice.
That’s what I call a grift. Your description reminded me of Dan Olson’s fantastic video on that type of strategy—where you make money by selling the idea that anyone can make passive income by doing something the seller doesn’t themselves do (anymore)—using the Mikkelsen Twins as the example.
In Dan’s words (emphasis mine), the Mikkelsen Twins aren’t special, grifters like them are a dime a dozen. He chose them as the example “because they are of a type. They are a representative sample of a category of grift. And also because they’re kind of incompetent and that makes them entertaining”.
He’s not wrong.
Cory built and grew SaaSPegasus to success long before the starter kit trend among indie hackers of the last year.
Hate to break it to you but this trend of selling people a system to make money where the seller is actually enacting the system they’re selling is older than the internet.
I can recall online versions in 2012 - that I’m ashamed to say took me for some money - were not just in existence but popular and fashionable the way indie hackers is now. Nothing new.
Rich Dad Poor Dad was published in 1997. I think it fits into the category.
The Dave Del Dotto system! Late 80s?
It’s not too dissimilar from MLMs, and those are older than the oldest living human, dating at least to the early twentieth century.
I'm not talking about selling shovels in general.
I'm talking about the specific SaaS starter kit trend of recent and that Cory's work predates it - specifically because of snark like yours, which has seen an uptick because of the recent trend.
I'm only pointing out that those SaaS starter kits existed over ten years ago, and I've got the invoice to prove it! :D
Okay, fair, my bad!
Even that is selling a platform to other people trying to start a business that probably won’t be successful
Once I realized this article was marketing I left.
Do you have more evidence of this? I'm genuinely curious. I read the whole post, and perhaps I missed it but I didn't see a breakdown of his income streams.
I say this because, at first blush, I was glad that a bunch of the products he listed that he built seemed generally like real products that I could imagine people finding useful. I say this because it feels like, in contrast, so often in these solopreneur posts they're selling some kind of scammy SEO or ad-spam tool.
So yeah, I'd be bummed if this guy turned out to be the tech equivalent of "Buy my real estate investing course!", and just curious if that's really what this is.
Edit: Nevermind, I saw https://www.coryzue.com/open/.
This!
I immediately thought about Robert Kiyosaki, author of 'rich dad poor dad' I was eagerly reading as student. I later came to realize Robert converted to making money by selling his story and advice (and 'rat race' game :] which I also purchased! )
And the book, Expert Secrets
> it is in no means a template for other people to start a successful passive income business with a working business idea.
it is when the working idea is to sell a template for other people to start a successful passive income business
Sounds like the main ingredient of a Ponzi scheme to me.
The immortal grifter Tai Lopez lives on.
I’m a lot more proud of bookshelf you see.
I can't believe that video is almost 10 years old now, wow.
sell the shovel
Here's an off-the-cuff summary:
First you have to make space in your life for it. You need long blocks of time for deep work.
The first idea you pick is unlikely to work, so pick something and start moving. Many of the best products come out of working on something else.
When building, optimize for speed. Try to get something out in the world as quickly as possible and iterate from there.
Pick a tech stack you're familiar with, that you'll be fastest in.
Try to spend half your time on marketing/sales, even if you hate it.
The most important skill you can have is resiliance. Not giving up is the best path to success. This is hard because there is so much uncertainty in this career path.
It's worth it! The autonomy and freedom are unmatched by any other career.
This is not really passive income. What he's describing is running your own one-person business. That's about as far from passive as you can get.
Actual passive income is living off the returns and royalties from assets, doing nothing but managing those assets (or maybe not even doing that).
But you have to work to get those assets, just like building a website
OK, but TFA is about the work part, not the passive part, despite the title. Even having a “portfolio of revenue generating products” will require work to maintain. Maybe full time or more so, depending on if you used log4j or an SSL cert from a provider that screwed things up, say. Or built on a fickle platform like reddit, twitter or Apple that changes the fundamental rules every so often. Just because you don’t have a boss that will fire you for not waking up for on call during an outage, doesn’t mean that outages won’t happen or need to be fixed.
It reminds me of people that consider buying a second home and rent out the old one to gain “passive income”, not realizing how much work it can be to be a good landlord.
I feel like "passive" income is anything that takes under 10 hours a week once it's up and running. There's rarely any opportunity that can be considered passive if your definition is 0 work ever once it's going. The only thing that [might] fit into that slot is investment dividends.
I don’t know if it’s 0 for me, but it’s definitely way less than 10 hours per week.
I have ETFs and a HYSA that I basically never look at. That’s passive.
yeah I guess if passive means no ongoing work (beyond what it took to get them in the first place) then you're right. OP is playing a bit loose with the definition if that's what it's supposed to mean.
Good summary. I've landed on all of the above with my own projects, from a mix of experience, reading, and reason. Hardest for me has been making time between family, work, and other activities that are important for me.
Unlike when I was younger I can't just stay up coding until 3AM anymore. In fact I find myself without the mental energy after work that I want to put into my projects, so evenings are out completely for me.
So instead I wake up at 5AM and put myself into it before work. It was a big adjustment, but all I needed to do while acclimating to that schedule was ask myself each morning which I wanted more: warm blankets or a successful project? Now it's a pretty energizing way to start the day.
> but all I needed to do while acclimating to that schedule was ask myself each morning which I wanted more: warm blankets or a successful project?
I choose warm blankets lying next to my warm wife where my heat and shelter is paid by exchanging my labor for money 40 hours a week, paid time off, paid health care, etc
Take the warm blankets into the office with you
In other words, it’s the exact same bland, generic, worthless advice parroted by every grifter selling you the dream of financial independence via passive income.
And if you fail, it’s your own fault, you just didn’t want it enough, you didn’t do the necessary sacrifices.
The advice (in the post you're replying to) isn't bad. But you can do it all, and still not have lightning strike.
> The advice (in the post you're replying to) isn't bad.
I didn’t call it bad, I called it bland, generic, and worthless. Like telling people they should eat healthily and exercise. It’s not wrong or bad, but it’s also not something you haven’t heard hundreds of times before and doesn’t really help you much.
I certainly do not think is good. I won’t say I’ve seen destroyed lives because of it, but pretty much miserable in comparison to what it had been if not followed the advice. It is just bot for anyone, and just too often fails.
And I've seen people succeed (admittedly by spending every spare minute devoting themselves to the pursuit of money).
Can we agree that it is, at core, gambling? Like spending all your disposable income on lottery tickets?
> Can we agree that it is, at core, gambling? Like spending all your disposable income on lottery tickets?
Yes. Can we also agree that advising people to spend all of their disposable income on gambling is bad advice to make money? I think you’re agreeing with the post you replied to.
I think, if someone's going to gamble anyway, gambling competently is better than gambling poorly. (Am I stretching this analogy too far?) Entrepreneurship may not be for you (or me), but there are people who find it a deeply satisfying path to walk. If they're going to do that, they should at least do it with the best possible odds of success.
> And I've seen people succeed (admittedly by spending every spare minute devoting themselves to the pursuit of money).
Is that what you call success?
It was for him. It wouldn't have been for me, hence the caveat.
Different people have different goals.
Well, when you put it like that, it sounds pretty fluffy.
When my life was falling apart and I was trying to fix my relationship with my ex she dictated that we spend 'quality' time together which meant watching horrible reality TV while she was on insta on her phone.
Out of mind numbing boredom I made a system for SEO spam websites during this time. I would take expiring domain names (so names someone had gone to the trouble to research but been unable to make work) parse out keywords and lookup popularity for them, lookup ad rates for them, and spit out names to buy and make a SEO spam site for (goal was 300 websites making $1 a day or $100k a year), or good names to domain squat. If a domain turned out bunk I threw my link-spam-network software on it to provide linkbacks to my money/new sites. I made around 30k profit a year plus another $5k selling domain names doing this before life fell further apart and it rotted on the vine. I was really tempted to sell it as a package but could never bring myself that low even deep in addiction. Plus Google started cracking down on that trash.
I still think the concept of 300 somethings (though please not SEO spam) that make a dollar a day is viable for us here though because we're in the unique position where the creation/maintenance is just a matter of our spare time since we can do the specs/design/coding/administration/maintenance/etc ourselves. It seems like there are still people doing this. Look at new car model forums. Everytime a new car models is released there's a rush to create discussion forums for that model with people hoping Google blesses theirs so they can add it to their portfolio of money maker car model forums. Maybe the secret sauce is forcing yourself to watch reality TV until your mind rebels and says 'fine, grab me the laptop and we'll make mind numbingly boring software products as that is at least better than watching this'.
Edit: To clarify this wasn't my income source this was just what I did while being forced to watch 'The Kardashians' for bonding time.
The world does not need more spam. I do not think watching the Kardashians was punishment enough for you. I wish it was Barney theme in a loop at 100dB
I will add we also watched Tori Spelling's reality show so maybe I paid my dues.
Yeah I was ashamed to share this anecdote. But decided maybe it can do a little good motivating someone to counter the bad. And I'm pretty sure SEO spam doesn't work anymore so it shouldn't encourage more evil.
I'm glad you shared it. Compared to 2025's crypto scams and influencer nonsense what you did was pretty tame.
This post might just be the saddest indictment I've seen against the modern internet that Google's rules have created
Appreciate the honesty
I forgive you.
Using your coding skills: 1) make hello-world-ish portfolio 2) sell courses how to make money using coding skills 3) PROFIT
Reading this, it feels much more like "using coding skills to make income". It's a great description of one person's journey, but "work hard for a decade, continue to work at a healthy lighter pace after" isn't really passive income in my mind.
And I'm not sure it beats, e.g., work hard and save hard at tech company for a decade, then use the invested surplus as passive income to work lightly thereafter. At least, not in the general case.
> work hard and save hard at tech company for a decade, then use the invested surplus as passive income to work lightly thereafter
I used an LLM to help me do the math but it appears you would have to make $1.5 million/year at "tech company" if you were to save 20% of your income and have $4 million saved after 10 years. That $4mm saved would allow you to appreciate to $5mm to retire on after 20 years while simultaneously withdrawing $150,000/year in passive income to live on.
Of course you can adjust this based on how aggressively you save, how much you need to withdraw each year, and how much runway you have until retirement and how much retirement you need to be comfortable.
Regardless, what you're suggesting is available only to the privileged few who can get extremely high-paying jobs early in their careers and hold onto them while having low enough expenses and high enough discipline to save aggressively.
OP's approach is a very doable path for folks who aren't so fortunate and/or young, but can code, have some life experience, and don't want to go get another job.
Your choice of numbers is very odd - even though you mention that you can adjust them for your own circumstances, the starting point is unrealistic.
- Very few people earn $1.5M/year
- Saving 20% implies that you're spending ~$1M/year while working, so $150k/year in retirement would not be appealing
Did the LLM pick the numbers for you?
Whoosh. You missed the point completely.
Of course very few people earn $1.5M/year. That's my point -- the poster I was replying to was naively thinking they could just work hard for a tech company and save for 10 years and then live off the passive income of the saved investment, which is silly.
The rest of the numbers were conservative figures I chose. $5mm to retire, 20% saved while working, $150k/year passive income. The whole point is that what he's describing is pretty unrealistic.
Whoosh. You missed the point completely.
How did you choose "20% saved while working" as a number? Why not 80%?
You’re both utterly thoughtless since you’d consider withdrawing money rather than taking taking relatively low interest loans out against that equity, leaving the bulk of your millions to appreciate longer
I mean, you’d be terrorizing the economy, but that’s also what you do when you eat food grown and prepared by people with inadequate labor protections, so why not take the red pill and double down on being a true slave-supported neo-Athenian?
Interactive Brokers (one of the best) has margin rates that are 5.17-5.83% at the moment depending on the size of the loan. Whether or not you want to pay rates like that and be potentially leveraged in the market, is a personal question. Not sure what any of this has to do with terrorizing the economy though ...
How do you spend 80% of a 1.5 million (lets say 800,000 post-tax) salary each year? That'd be an incredibly lavish lifestyle. If you cut your spending down to a cool $200,000/year then you could retire in 5 years and have $150,000/year for the rest of your life.
Let's run a different scenario: your post-tax income is $200k and you save half of that. In 11 years, you can retire and get $100k per year at a 4% withdrawal rate.
People in either of these scenarios are obviously privileged, but the latter isn't unrealistic for a single FAANG dev.
engaging-data.com has cool fire calculators. Highly recommend checking them out
Throw the following at your LLM's passive income calculation:
- income: tech sector salary median
- spending: median spending + 25%
- passive income target: median net income
Now add some indie project income as a topping.
If you're not very close to passive income after ten years, you're doing it wrong. If you're not financially responsible for lots of people, that is.
You could work a $500k/year job and safe $350k a year. Or a $400k and save $250k. A $1.5M/year job is a wild overestimate of what's required.
Good timing with this submission as I started selling commercial use software licenses using a subscription model this year (Jan 2025) and I'm amazed that 6 people have already signed up and paid for a license.
The text-based tech internet has become incredibly hostile to people sharing their work over the past decade, so a few years ago I decided to try and engage people through YouTube instead and I think this has been a decision that has really paid off. For people interested in pursuing something like this I'd definitely recommend trying out video format communication over blog posts and articles if the latter aren't doing well for you.
I have done a lot of "building in public" on YouTube over the past few years and have built up a really solid product that people have been actively asking me to release a commercial license for so that they can use it at work. I feel pretty good about things right now!
I checked out the links in your profile -- kudos to you for building useful things and putting them (and yourself) out there!
Getting from 0 to 1 is the hardest part, and you're at 6 already. I hope you keep at it, for years, and see monotonically increasing numbers. Doing something like this (sustainably) would be fantastic success.
Best of luck!
Thanks for the encouragement! Truth be told, I had never thought of myself who could take things from 0 to 1 until I read this comment :)
If anyone has trouble focusing on personal projects at home, I've found Focusmate (www.focusmate.com) to be very handy. You hop on a scheduled google-meets style video call with someone random, and then just work. You talk very briefly at the beginning to tell each other what you're working on and then you both mute yourselves for 25 - 75 minutes.
It's weird, I've found it really ticks my brain into productivity mode.
Do pomodoro timers have the same effect for you? I assume it's the pressure of giving yourself fixed amounts of time and the knowledge of the fact that a break is coming up (so that you don't take one unintentionally) that really drives the productivity.
I've never been able to sitck with pomodoros to the same degree, because ultimately there's no cost or shame to pausing or ignoring a self imposed timer
There is a slight something to ignoring it when there's a person on the other side, even if it is a perfect stranger that I will never see again
Seems a very elaborate way just to do some work.
It’s how an extroverts brain works. Same reason extroverted CEO’s were pushing for return to office. Social pressure to get work done.
One part of me is itching to do it. Another part of me can't let it go that I can't beat leetcode interviews. I'm quite close, I think I can do it.
I guess it's an ego thing. But not fully though is it? Earning a couple of years of FAANG money opens one up to then just travel the world. I'm from the EU but will make the switch to the US in about a year from now (marriage). So from that perspective, I just don't know if it's strategic. When you have $300K in the bank and you just go to SE asia, you also have "no schedule" etc.
That should be doable with FAANG. I do feel this path delivers more impact though as life becomes a bit more like a game and you're creating your own quests. You're solving things that you are quick enough at to solve but also things that you find important or just simply fun.
Man, I'm torn. Both take quite a bit of a time investment. I'm not sure how I can monetize a "leetcode with me" type of thing. If there was still a market for that, I might do that to start both things off at the same time. Maybe I should just become a Twitch streamer :') But I don't think that'd pay off. I guess it wouldn't hurt to try.
> Earning a couple of years of FAANG money opens one up to then just travel the world.
If you can resist lifestyle inflation
I could now but that'd be tough with kids.
> you just go to SE asia
I could see justifying a trip like that on a cost-of-living basis. If you go to a place like Thailand, you are going to be spending pennies on the dollar vs. the EU, even after paying incredible amounts (in local currency) for first-world conveniences like clean drinking water and internet. So in that sense if you are going to be coding and living life online, you might as well live someplace cheap IRL. But that's different from a tourist crawl where you are just spending money like water, which maybe was more your idea.
With all the FAANG layoffs is this still a realistic goal for many people?
Fair question, maybe I'm a bit too starry eyed. What do you think?
I think the question provided the answer. The market is being flooded with ex-FAANG developers and it is no longer a job seeker's market. In today's environment it is a LOT harder to get hired by anyone, let alone a FAANG company. I know really good people who have been out of a job for +6 months now.
Based on past history, now is not the time to shoot for the stars, but to start consolidating your base and preparing for the next upturn.
> preparing for the next upturn.
Prepare how? I fled to be a data analyst. For multiple reasons. One: the job interview was a cake walk (for me at least). I was unprepared and I aced it despite not really knowing what a data analyst was. It helps that I have a fairly good statistics background from back in the day. I'm also better paid since they don't pay software engineers that well in the Netherlands, so data analyst salaries seem more competitive locally.
But yea, I'd be curious what you specifically mean by it.
How is “spending my free time coding after I get off work instead of spending time exercising, spending time with friends and family, traveling, hobbies, etc”, “passive income”?
If you read the post, that's explicitly a path I acknowledge I couldn't personally do, and I recommend instead creating time by doing things like going down to 80% time in your day job, or finding lucrative contract work.
And the vast majority of jobs are not going to let you go down to 80% time and if you are just a commodity “coder”, you aren’t going to find lucrative staff augmentation contracts.
It’s been awhile since I had a job where I was responsible for hiring staff augmentation “consultants”. But the hourly rate that they got was shit.
On the other hand, if you have the background, skillset, network, etc to be a highly paid strategic consultant who knows how to talk to the “business” and bring in a specialized skillset, you don’t need side income to have the freedom that you want. You can charge a high enough hourly rate that you can already basically set your own schedule.
I fall into the latter category. But I choose to work full time for consulting companies because they take care of all of the headaches.
Yeah this came up in the Q&A of the video as well. I think if you are 1) a high performer and 2) not working for a mega-corp, you probably have a lot more negotiating power than you realize. Having been on the other end of some of those conversations, as a manager/executive if your options are to either to let someone take Friday's off and cut their salary by 20% or potentially lose them entirely to another job, it's pretty clear that it's better to take 4 days from them. Hiring is still one of the biggest problems companies face, and most would rather retain good people than force them out.
Looking at your portfolio, one could argue that to succeed you need to try a lot of different projects some of which you maybe have no personal interest in.
I think some people would not be comfortable with this and rather take a steady paycheck from Big Corp while working on 1-2 darling projects at home.
...maybe? Although that doesn't quite ring true. Every project (even the dumb wedding cards one) arose from some need in my life that turned into a desire to make something exist in the world.
That said, I totally agree that some people would rather keep the steady paycheck. The career is a large up-front investment with a variable outcome. But, it's not as hard as it can be made out to be, and the payoff, if successful, is immense.
It kind of mirrors my observations in what makes a successful individual in the world of ecommerce, you gotta have the capital to start like ten ideas at once then you whittle out which one don't profit more than 10k a month and come up with new ones to fill the place.
Shit sounds like tedium or uncomfortable or whatever to some, but I know multiple millionaires on this tip.
> First you have to make space in your life for it. You need long blocks of time for deep work.
This is the obstacle to EVERYTHING in my life. It's very chaotic, which causes a lot of stress and has led to decreasing performance.
I try so hard to clean up, to improve things. To try to proactively get ahead of stuff. It never seems to be enough. Something happens I cannot prepare for, or in trying to save and be efficient something goes wrong I cannot afford. My whole plan, saving AND getting things done has now blown up. I no longer have one, I now have three problems and I have also lost/wasted a day. Tomorrow I have four problems, plus I am aware of this dynamic and unable to escape it so technically 5?
This compounds over time.
How do you escape this failure loop?
tl;dr: the "being poor is expensive" trap, how escape when so burned out you are struggling to tread water?
It's not just money, it's attention span. It's the ability to set my mind to something and accomplish what I set out. Having that muscle atrophy and tear has been traumatic and I am struggling to find emotional or medical interventions worth the effort.
It really depends on the specifics of your life. I get a lot of mileage out of imagining what a more functional adult would do, then doing that (stupid example: <FUNCTIONAL ADULT> doesn't buy the cheapest shoes available and try to make them last 5 years while enduring back pain). It's hard to change quickly; sometimes decisions I made years ago (or that someone in my family made decades ago) throw a wrench in the works. I also took a big step back from various forms of ambition, in favor of building a solid, enjoyable life. I hope it gets better for you too.
> I also took a big step back from various forms of ambition, in favor of building a solid, enjoyable life.
I think you are onto something here, but there's no way to keep my current situation sustainable let alone live on less. The financial thing I can't do much about but the psychological maybe. It's hard when I feel like there is nobody to help me and I have to do everything alone.
From this and your other comments life sucks for you right now. There's no magic bullet. Religion might help or it might mess you up worse. Sometimes life sucks for a while then gets better. Keep your head up - find one thing you can still enjoy and savor it.
Of course, I know nothing about your particular situation, but one strategy is to simplify life as much as you can. This could be lowering living costs by moving and getting rid of expensive habits. Lower overhead can be huge factor in reducing distraction and stress. Other strategies are reducing the number of activities, avoid using phones and other distractions during work periods, avoid social media and political discussion and encourage focus on your goals, setting boundaries with family and friends, saying “no” more often to requests, avoiding triggers that distract you or cause stress, create a dedicated and quiet workspace with few distractions, and generally focus on fewer goals at a time.
> focus on fewer goals at a time
Beyond this very specific thing, I think its also a struggle with trusting myself. I don't trust myself to finish anything. I can try as hard as I want but my locus of control is completely external. I am tired of being lied to about agency and ability. If it was easy as putting effort in I'd be there already.
So I work harder and harder in an effort to MAYBE be enough for society / work etc and I am STILL not enough. How can you believe in yourself when you are the source of all failure, lack of consistency, inability to change or adapt. It's me. I'm the problem. I try to be better but at some point I am just masking who I am, which is a WHOLE other problem that is not mutually exclusive. It's another one of those "can't follow the issue because it's too complicated" problems that's destroying my life. Nobody undertands, everyone tells me I'm not alone (they are wrong) and nobdody has any reasonable or actionable suggestions because nobody I have talked to yet even remotely grasps what I am going through. My therapist is really the only person who gets it.
So many times I have tried to do the "right" thing only for it to backfire and make everything worse. It's textbook learned helplessness, but I also have a proverbial textbook of evidence to support my reasons why things won't work. Nobody will listen to me, and then when the thing I tell them won't work FAILS it's my fault for pointing out the laws of physics or nature. I am tired of being the scapegoat for sociopaths and Machiavellian cancer.
I accept that I need to accept failure. I am trying, but it's demoralizing and only seems to cause pain not growth. I can usually maintain optimism for a week or more but inevitably the reality of life creeps back in and I can't lie to myself any longer.
What works for me: Goal setting (e.g. OKR), taking baby steps and autopiloting. Can't manage to do X for 30mins a day? I'll go down to as low as 5mins to do thing X if that is required to still do it consistently. If I manage to go to work for 8hrs every day, I'll manage to wake up 5mins earlier and do X as well. Granted, you need to be reasonably convinced that it's a good investment of your time.
Edit: Just saw your other response. Now is certainly not the right time to push yourself, which is fine. Hope you'll get out of that hole soon, best of luck!
I’m sorry that you feel alone and that no one understands. I’m assuming that it’s important for you to find people that do understand, but people don’t always understand especially when someone has unorthodox methods that are likely correct but go against the normal path. This particular issue has frustrated me many times.
I’m speaking for myself of course, but maybe it’s not about accepting the failure itself, but accepting that failure or disappointment is a learning opportunity providing feedback. Failure is a strong term while in reality results are somewhere between success and failure, and recognizing it is not a binary. Usually there are successes and failures in a project with the key observation being what you as an individual can do to improve the environment (e.g. avoiding sociopathic, coworkers, Machiavellian corporate practices, poor work environments, etc). Anyway, I apologize if my attempt to understand is off the mark and wish you luck navigating to an endeavor where you can find more satisfaction.
Sounds like you need to first make your life less chaotic. This could mean making some hard choices.
This is usually possible to some degree but the life circumstances creating the chaos may not be things they can realistically get rid of.
Nail on the head. Lost wife / family (cat) / house over the summer. Mom in and out of hospital starting in November. I'm a cat locked in the dryer and there are no door handles on the inside.
My deepest sympathies. Find a way to spend some time and money on therapy if you can. It will help stop the problem making itself worse.
I kinda figured. Sorry bro. No easy answers, unfortunately.
I want to believe.
But is this really still possible in todays world?
Isn't there competition from the thousands of software devs laid off in last couple years. They can all make apps.
Just like the Flappy Bird guy. Sure, it was big hit, but so easy to have a hundred knock offs within a week.
I think it's simply survivorship bias. Thousands of people try this and fail. And occasionally you read an article like this, which is like the one in a million who managed to get lucky with their ideas and manage to make it a success. And I think they underestimate how much luck they had.
Luck is a huge factor for sure but I also think it's not as hard as you're making it out to be if you set yourself up for success.
I have four products that make money, built over the course of seven years. None of them really benefit from each other. If it was pure luck and 1/1,000 chance of success I don't think my current portfolio would be possible. (I also have a lot of failures, so I agree there's luck and risk, just not as strong as you're making it out to be)
The thousands of software devs that got laid off aren't starting businesses.
They're also not a cross-domain expert at the same things you are. You might be in the top N coders in a niche, and you might be the only one with the motivation to work on the problem.
You also might just do it better than them.
And last, you might just split the pie with them. Really, it's okay to have many apps doing the same thing with different approaches.
Part of the goal might be to stay under the radar.
In a pre-app world, I wrote some blogs with ads.
Some of my favourite ones were dumb but fairly evergreen articles where I had domain knowledge like “best directions to the dmv offices in $mytown”. (Pro-tip: it’s upstairs at the XYZ shopping mall, but if you park by the pizza place, you’ll be at the doors that take you straight there)
Reliable and consistent income.
Not a ton, but more like a bond than a stock.
The world would require an x-th number of skilled developers existing for problems that could be solved by digital services. Ask in any forum about any niche/hobby/expert field and they tell you dozens of things they would gladly pay for but doesn't exist.
It's one thing to be a good dev/coder, but another level entierly to be a one man team delivering a product.
Building a business is more than just building the app. And everything can be duplicated for cheap, especially with gen-ai. But small-businesses will transform, continue and dare-I-say thrive.
Yeah, one of the critical lessons I learned is that building is really the easy part, and most "traditional" developers who fail will do so as a result of not marketing enough, or well. That's an oversimplification, but directionally true.
Being able to make apps isn't enough. You also have to develop a broad set of skills to complement that.
>They can all make apps.
They could, but most likely they are doom scrolling while saying things like "Isn't there competition from the thousands of software devs laid off in last couple years. They can all make apps."
:)
Yeah. Lot of that.
How many apps we can point to that are huge today, are really not that complicated, and any number of people 'could have' built them.
>Just like the Flappy Bird guy. Sure, it was big hit, but so easy to have a hundred knock offs within a week.
I doubt the creator minds too much, I know I wouldn't: he still made millions off it.
It's not uncommon for post succesful people to resent their greatest hits
I’ve been wanting to do this for years but I’m still trying to figure out how to get started.
My skills are more in algorithm development (statistical signal processing, machine learning) and electronics than web coding though, so it’s probably not as easy as just making a simple website that does something slightly useful.
I'm in the same boat, but my domain is embedded programming.
I recently ran across advice here to just copy an existing successful idea and compete on e.g., price, rather than wasting time trying to come up with something novel / innovative. The argument is that if the idea is successful, then most of the market legwork has been done for you already.
I'm considering entertaining it. I last seriously did WWW-related work in 2001 or so, but Python with FastAPI + HTMX + Bulma CSS looks easy enough to spin-up on and maps pretty well to my now-ancient understanding of the web.
I’ve done simple one off web stuff over the years and yeah it seems much more straightforward nowadays.
Copying and undercutting someone else is certainly easier!
Unless you are trying to develop something ground breaking, web isn't terribly difficult if you have programming experience. Yes, there will be some new things to grasp. However, tooling is pretty great today and if you pick up a known framework most problems are already solved. You will just fit the pipes together to do what you want.
Cyber plumbing
on the other hand I would venture to say there are less like you (demand) than generic web devs
Knowing how to code can have very useful local applications, which reduces your competition. Of course it may not immediately scale in the same way but leveraging connections and local know how is an angle that tends to go under-explored at least in the online narrative, is my observation.
Good post! I think the gradual transition you were able to do from salary -> consulting -> software products is very important and not the norm (mainly being able to keep part of your salary while doing some consulting on the side). The only people I've seen able to do that are VPs or C-suite.
I'm below those rungs. So I'm quitting my job to go "all in" on the consulting. (But I've been prepping and will make sure things line up so I can hit the ground running.)
All of this is to say, I think that transition either during or after salary work is the super important part that I see everyone gloss over.
My goal is to make a fraction of my salary with consulting for the first couple years, focus just on that, and eventually shift my focus to software products.
With consulting, you're responsible for finding and securing all your opportunities.
With work, they're fed to you (at volume!).
Don't underestimate the opportunity cost of any decision. Right now with such broad tech+business awareness, being at the right place at the right time is pretty much your only differentiator.
So perhaps consulting will lead organically to the best opportunity, but often opportunity is gated by access to a good team, reasonable infrastructure, and most importantly good customers with leading-edge problems.
Cool article. I feel like a lot of these 'passive income' things though are just 'X purchaces diffused over time until the market niche is saturated'; hence the need to keep making new sites/products
This is what I want to do ultimately, but I'm at a sort of crossroads. I have a good job, a consulting side gig, a good family, and 0 hours for my own ambitions. Several years ago I made about 20k on a solo project, so I know I'm capable. I just need to be able to focus on my dream instead of someone else's. Lately I've landed on 'it will happen when it needs to', but I also worry that I'm plateaued and will wish I'd risked it earlier.
I wonder how LLMs will impact this industry.
10 years ago, when I was chasing this - I'd look for proven business models. Find some small startup / company that sells some software or service, try to figure out what they did and how they did it, then spend time getting into the domain, tech, and what have you. It was a lot of work, and took time.
If I do it now, I have the luxury of simply asking my LLM of choice to give me a run-down, and what I need to do. Hell, I've even experimented and gotten a LLM to dish up a working MVP in a single day, which I can iterate on.
But how do you make sure you're solving the right problem? LLM?
You find existing solutions to a problem, and copy it. That's it.
People spend time chasing novel problems, or coming up with solutions that are looking for problems - when in reality the vast majority of business and entrepreneurship comes down to looking for tested/validated business problems, looking at the existing solutions, and finding ways to enter that market, and win/siphon customers.
I will try to dig up some concrete numbers but for vast majority of people they make more money lifetime from working and saving some of that money and then investing that. So IMO for people in software the correct way for passive income is earning a lot actively working so you can have passive income from investments portfolio
Dimagi became successful?!? Awesome! I also worked there as a third person, though I don't think overlapping with you. :)
Congrats on living the dream, I tried, failed at that 5 years ago ("maybe i can just sell my coding directly...") though I probably gave up too quickly.
Nice article!
Hahaha, what?! Are you the one that went to Burning Man without telling anyone and then re-appeared online a couple weeks later wondering whether you still had your job? Because, if so, that story definitely made the rounds...
HAHAHAHAH!
Oh man... Ouch! First time I'm hearing it put that way!! As far as I knew, the contract was done before I left town! :)
But that absolutely, to a T, sounds like (a distorted version of...) *exactly* the sort of miscommunication I'd get into 20 years ago.
Glad to hear some version of my youthful exploits turned into tales, even if I have to be the "heel". :)
bows
Unpopular opinion: truly "passive" income should be impossible, because this means someone is working hard but not receiving their compensation.
EDIT: of course unless it's the robots that do all the work, but then it's not really passive...
Coffezilla already covered this exact topic four years ago[0].
I still want to do this 9 years later I still haven't made something. Still working for someone else. Going to get out of debt first then work on it again, I want to be able to sleep/wake whenever.
Blatant self-promotion, and a post history of primarily self-promotion: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=czue