Software is the holy grail of passive income business models right? You can create something once, and sell it over and over again for basically zero incremental cost.
At least that’s the dream :)
In these archives you’ll meet successful software and app entrepreneurs, many of whom started their journey as side hustlers.
Christopher Gimmer is the founder of Snappa.com, where you can “create online graphics in a snap.” Like perfectly sized social media graphics or blog images easily and professionally.
He’s built a cool do-it-yourself tool that’s sold on a monthly or annual subscription model. Another example of a recurring revenue model that can be scaled up over time.
We’ve heard of niche sites seeing success with AdSense or Amazon Associates income, or even with selling private advertising, but Jon Haws took a completely different approach.
Since last November, Jon has masterfully experimented with 5 different avenues and built up a huge email list. All told, these different channels — that didn’t even exist a year and a half ago — are earning more than $20,000 a month!
If you’re looking at a niche or authority business and need some new ideas on how to serve your audience, this is a can’t miss episode.
I’m excited to introduce you to John Rouda, an IT manager near Charlotte, North Carolina. He’s built a variety of non-job income streams on the side, while still working full time.
In fact, we recorded this session from his office at work!
John calls his side businesses for-profit hobbies, which I think is a great attitude to take. He has a handful of books on Amazon, dozens of apps in the app store, is a part-time professor, and runs a local IT/computer maintenance service business.
Is there still an opportunity in smartphone apps?
Carter Thomas thinks so, and shares some interesting and insightful ways to take advantage of the 3 giant app marketplaces (Apple, Google, and Amazon).
Carter and his company are app-production machines, pumping out a crazy 1500 new apps in 2 years (mostly 2013 and 2014). Nowadays, the strategy has shifted somewhat to creating fewer apps and putting more resources and marketing behind them.
John Logar is the king of pre-selling software. As one of The Foundation’s top students, he’s broken all their records and even broken the mold on some of the methods they teach.
In fact, he sold $120k worth of software within his first 6 months of joining the program.
Since he was already a consultant, doing idea extraction and finding pain points for businesses was second nature. He just knew nothing about software before so just added a new weapon to his arsenal. (Without learning how to program.)
It’s been almost 2 months since we last caught up with Wellington, one of my public coaching volunteers. Where we left off, he was working on a smartphone app for travel hackers and kicking around the idea for a software business in the home renovation estimating world.
Our last session was a rough one.
Wellington had just broken his foot and had his app repeatedly rejected from the app store for bugs that needed to be fixed. To make matters worse, his day job had become increasingly demanding and he was putting in 60-70 hour weeks at work.
Where we left off with Wellington, he was facing some quality control challenges with his app developer in building the Getaway Geek travel hacking app.
There was some back-and-forth after some testing and a lot of bugs that needed to be fixed. Since we spoke, those had been reasonably buttoned up and Wellington submitted the app to the App Store for approval.
Unfortunately, it’s been rejected … 3 different times.
In this episode we’re catching up with Wellington, my public coaching volunteer in New York. Where we left off, he was working with an outsourced app developer to finalize a beta version of his travel hacking app for the app store.
He shared that he’d previously only ever made $0.07 online, but has the goal of earning $2500 a month by the end of 2015. One of the biggest challenges for Wellington is time; he’s been working 12-13 hour days for his day job, and making the most of his limited evening hours and commuting time.
Jon Nastor is lifelong side-hustler, the co-founder of VelocityPage.com, a pain-free webpage building tool for WordPress that’s grown to hundreds of users, and as a side hustle, he hosts the top-rated Hack the Entrepreneur podcast.
His situation is somewhat unique in the software world in that he’s NOT a coder or a programmer.
Instead, he had an idea of what he wanted to build, from his own frustrations, and set out to find a technical partner to make it a reality.
I’m excited to welcome Spencer Haws back to the show this week!
Longtime listeners may remember Spencer from episode 18 of the show, where he gave us a step-by-step walkthrough of how he builds profitable niche sites from scratch.
But in addition to his niche site empire, Spencer is also an accomplished software entrepreneur. His popular Long Tail Pro software powers the keyword research for thousands of customers.