The sidebar provides your daily dose of designer links to followers and subscribers. However, it’s worth noting that Greif doesn’t like the term “passive income” and prefers to call it “scalable income,” believing the former to imply that there is little work involved. And he has a point. Because while the ultimate goal is to make money “doing nothing,” you certainly have to work hard to achieve it. You may also be interested in: 7 tips to calculate your freelance rate. Passive Income Side Projects Hard work has certainly been the case with Is In Stock, a project that California web designers Jeff Toll, Jake Bellacera, and Garrett Bjerkhoel have undertaken in their spare time, outside of their full-time jobs. Is In Stock provides instant text and email notifications about hard-to-find products that are back in stock.
In its first seven weeks, the team has already made three major product launches: Apple Air Pods, BeatsX Earphones, and Nintendo Switch. But while this income may eventually become “passive,” launching a product from this complex has meant being very, very active. “When we first launched, we hadn’t fully understood the challenges of scaling the system,” says Bellacera. When we first launched, we hadn’t fully understood the challenges of scaling the system jake bellacera “For example, we shipped Cape- Verde Email List an update last week that increased the number of products we checked from just AirPods to around eight products total. In addition, we went from reviewing less than 500 stores to reviewing almost 4,000.”
Building Your Own Shopify
Bjerkhoel adds that as the frequency of checks increases, so does the frequency of errors. “We had to implement a bug checking system that alerts us, so we don’t have to go through bug logs.” All of this is a lot of work now, but the long-term goal is to reduce this need for constant maintenance. “The way we are designing the product requires as little effort as possible from us on a day-to-day basis,” says Bellacera. “So we can focus on the fun stuff, like adding new products, features, and engaging with our customers.” Another source of passive income that requires a lot of initial effort is writing and selling your own book, as Australian digital designer Matthew Vernon discovered with his e-book Sketch & Semplice.
Semplice is a WordPress portfolio site builder with a steep learning curve, so Vernon felt there might be some demand for a guide. To make sure, he first created a landing page that supported pre-orders through Gumroad. “I started sharing the page online, mostly through Twitter, and actually got some pre-orders,” he explains. He then spent about six hours a week for three months writing the book and marketed it through an email list on his landing page. “As I was about to finish, I told the list that if they retweet a specific tweet about the book, I would give them free access to an earlier version,” he adds. After releasing the finished book, he published it on Product Hunt, which is where things started to work.
You Juggle Themes, Apps and Client
“On the first day, it received around 100 upvotes and was number one in the Books of the Day section. I also had a friend post it to Designer News, where he stayed on the front page for a day or two. I received around 40 orders through these two sources.” Since then, despite Vernon doing little marketing, the book has continued to sell (mostly from people visiting his website or Twitter account, as well as the Product Hunt or Designer News sites). Vernon made about $1,800 in the first four months. And the success of his book isn’t just exceptional either; Vernon also makes passive income by creating Neue Goods in late 2015, a streetwear-inspired brand for designers and creatives. And the success of his book isn’t just exceptional either; Vernon also makes passive income by creating Neue Goods in late 2015,
