I made about 10k off sales from a WordPress theme over the course of about a year. Not that much money, but it's a GREAT feeling to wake up in the morning and see money in your account. I'd be walking through the mall with my girlfriend at the time and tell her, "just sold a premium copy! want ice cream?" Very, very motivating. It gets to the point that you get a "taking-candy-from-a-baby" feeling that leads you to really try and improve your product day-after-day, to keep your initial customers happy, and to get more sales.
So, I agree that a niche software product you're actually passionate about will help. I happened to be in a fortunate position where a demand existed for a one-off product I had created a while back, all I had to do was fill the void. Customers were already looking to me for it. I feel like a total fucking idiot for not doing it sooner. I could have made probably 3x the money, just guestimating. Find something that inspires you personally, because that is what will push you to completing it.
I got laid off from a startup position that was caving in. I had a small severance to live off of, and had always wanted to build this idea. Unfortunately while at the startup I was also working on a second one on the side (death, I know) so I never really had time to do anything but those two things. Getting laid off was perfect. I sprinted as hard as I possibly could for 3 weeks, designing, coding, and building a sale site with a mini activation server. It was loads of fun. It was also very exciting to look back on those three weeks and realize that I had done a great job making the right decision when hit with a small road block. Asking myself things like, "Where does this fit with the 80/20 rule? Can I launch this feature in a second update a week later? Do I need it at all? Oh, wait, these two features can easily be combined into one. The technology behind the two won't be nearly as cool, but users will probably prefer it." All of that, I feel, is what lead to my success. Getting the product out as soon as possible, without cutting any essential corners. We've all heard it before, but living it was great. I guess I pretty much built my own "nano" startup.
I get similar emails throughout the day and while it might be healthy for me to get the continuous stream of positive reward, sometimes it is demotivating to me. I start the day by waking up in the afternoon and checking my email, and I've already generated my wealth for the day without doing anything.
This is significantly less demotivating than working your ass off for a year with the promise of a promotion and a raise, only to be told that you won't be getting a promotion or raise at the end of the year.
This happened to me today and I totally understand why people want to go the startup route. Ever hour invested into your startup is an hour that gets you closer to where you want to be.
Ever hour invested into your startup is an hour that gets you closer to where you want to be.
This is not the case. You can burn through time, money, health, and other consumables chasing bad ideas and, if you're not measuring obsessively, not even know you're doing it until the company suddenly fails on you. (This is even more possible if you're not "in the loop" : many startups with actual employees which flamed out had highly motivated bright people who were hitting their performance targets, in the service of a business which just didn't work. That fact is, ahem, not always clearly communicated to all employees.)
That said: owning the effing company at least means that, if you're getting screwed out of something-to-keep for each hour you work, you should at least know whose fault it was. I really recommend it if working for The Man starts to feel exploitative. (Heads you win, tails you find out why The Man was offering you the terms he was offering.)
A couple of "route finder" reviews posts on an old personal blog of mine suddenly did well on Google and, as was the trend, I had Adsense on my site. Just from those few posts, I earned between $2000-$5000 most months of that year (with one stray month just shy of $10000) and did little "real" work that year. In 2009, Google penalized the blog because I got greedy and started running "text link ads" on the front page (dumb idea). Traffic crashed and the income stream disappeared.
I eventually got the penalty lifted but by then a lot of people had figured out that ranking highly for the names of the top route finders was a goldmine and now my posts are on page 2 rather than in the top 5 results and make rather little.
Interesting while it lasted but the work I'm doing now to produce an income feels more rewarding than checking Adsense 20 times a day ;-)
Online driving route apps like Rand McNally, etc. Thinking about it, these sites must have been hurt a lot by the features in Google Maps in recent years..
Original price was $29, and there was a Premium variant for $49. Eventually the source that was pushing so many customers to my site stopped using the theme herself, and my traffic/sales died substantially. I figured, "It had a good run, time to move on) so lowered the price to capture more of the trailing edge.
Curious to know if you reached out to her to see if you could build a new theme for her and then resell it. Would have been nice to keep that lead coming.
So, I agree that a niche software product you're actually passionate about will help. I happened to be in a fortunate position where a demand existed for a one-off product I had created a while back, all I had to do was fill the void. Customers were already looking to me for it. I feel like a total fucking idiot for not doing it sooner. I could have made probably 3x the money, just guestimating. Find something that inspires you personally, because that is what will push you to completing it.
I got laid off from a startup position that was caving in. I had a small severance to live off of, and had always wanted to build this idea. Unfortunately while at the startup I was also working on a second one on the side (death, I know) so I never really had time to do anything but those two things. Getting laid off was perfect. I sprinted as hard as I possibly could for 3 weeks, designing, coding, and building a sale site with a mini activation server. It was loads of fun. It was also very exciting to look back on those three weeks and realize that I had done a great job making the right decision when hit with a small road block. Asking myself things like, "Where does this fit with the 80/20 rule? Can I launch this feature in a second update a week later? Do I need it at all? Oh, wait, these two features can easily be combined into one. The technology behind the two won't be nearly as cool, but users will probably prefer it." All of that, I feel, is what lead to my success. Getting the product out as soon as possible, without cutting any essential corners. We've all heard it before, but living it was great. I guess I pretty much built my own "nano" startup.
Damnit, now I want to do it again.