[jasonkester]

There's an interesting dynamic at play with things like this. When you first build one of these "earn money in your sleep" SaaS products, it really doesn't make you all that much money. After a few months of being launched and signing customers, it's not at all uncommon to be bringing in something like $50/month.

At that point, it's tough to keep motivated to tweak, market, A/B Test and otherwise keep moving forward. Especially when you look at your consulting rate, or make the dreaded calculation to see how much your effective hourly rate has been for this f'ng side project.

But here's the thing. After a while, that $50/month starts looking more like $500/month. Then $1,000/month. Then $2,000/month. Sure, that's still, what? Two days worth of consulting revenue? Even then it's a bit hard to stay particularly excited. Consulting will pretty much always blow the doors off of what you can make on a side project.

But the thing with consulting is that as soon as you stop consulting, people stop sending you money. Products don't work like that. Want to take a month off and go backpacking through Honduras? Cool. Your product will pay you $2,000 to do that. Want to take a leap and try to build that shoot-for-the-moon startup idea you've always had kicking around? Go for it. Your product will take care of the rent for you.

Even better, products that charge by the month have a way of making you more money every month. Until attrition really kicks in, you're going to be signing more customers than you lose. Even if you only sign a few per month, that's revenue that just keeps piling on top of itself. So now, a couple years after that trip to Honduras and that woefully failed startup, check it out: you're bringing in $5,000 or even $10,000 every month on that silly little product. You really don't need to work anymore if you don't want to. Wow!

So yeah, products are actually pretty cool. They just don't seem like it at first. Stick with it though. It gets good.

[patio11]

Even better, products that charge by the month have a way of making you more money every month.

This bit of advice is probably in the top 3 of "Things I wish someone had told me in 2006."

[noahc]

Do you think that if someone told you that you wouldn't have built BCC? What I'm really asking is can you make everything reoccurring or are their certain markets that won't tolerate it.

[patio11]

I believed very strongly in 2006 that teachers would never go for recurring purchases. I also thought that there were only ~1,000 people in the entire world that would ever buy bingo card creation software. Belief #2 is demonstrably catastrophically inaccurate.

[cb18]

Other two?

[rmc]

Have you considered changing it? Surely there's an A/B test you can do.

[patio11]

That's a week or two of work (BCC is kinda creeky) and a whole lot of future customer support headaches to do that test (+), and the future revenues of BCC are the least important thing for my business success. I'd much rather spend the time on e.g. marketing AR and trying to 10x it's current revenue, or just do a week of consulting.

+ Despite having a totally consistent policy on this for the last five years, I have customers who either a) can't read and understand that BCC is a one-off purchase or b) actually think that BCC is billing them monthly (for free trial accounts) and want to cancel them to stop the billings on their Googles.

[euroclydon]

You can go to the purchase page of CWC, a spiritual BCC clone, and see the lengths I've gone to impress just that point.

[icey]

I agree with you, but there's something important to remember: If you want to make this work, you have to build your product in a way that someone else can support it when you're not actively giving it attention.

[jasonkester]

Indeed. Though I tend to lean towards building my products in a way that they need as close to zero support as possible.

That's actually tougher than it sounds, since it means picking a market full of people who are smart enough to not need much hand holding, then building your thing to be self explanatory enough that even the dumbest of those people won't be sending you emails every week.

It also means building on top of the most boring technology stack you can find, to avoid any whisper of doubt that you might need to touch the server for any reason during the times you'd rather be focusing your attention elsewhere (such as when you're off the map in Honduras, a full day's dugout ride from electricity.)

[ja27]

I help myself keep going when a project like that is slow to bring in revenue by measuring it in terms of what that can buy. My little $50 a month site is almost a new iPad a year and I don't spend any time on it.