I figured since I've been lurking here for almost 2 years, I should finally share something.

For those of you with design skills/skillz, I would suggest looking into the sale of digital goods. Why? Because they're awesome.

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In July of 2011, I launched a little icon set. It comes packaged as a set of vectors and an embeddable font-face you can use on the web. Since then, I’ve done basically no marketing, changed the website exactly once and still rack up a new sale every day or two.

I think I spent maybe two weeks, mostly evenings and weekends, and the total hours spent designing it all (90 icons) was approximately 25 hours. So realistically, building a nice digital product such as this is not a huge time investment.

I tweeted from the icon Twitter account (current followers as of this writing: 41) and retweeted it with my personal account (current followers: 523). This got some early attention and I got some retweets and/or shout-outs from some lovely people with 5000+ followers… and by some, I mean two. I’m sure it helped and I am super grateful, but it seems to have spread pretty organically since then.

Sales Graph - This is all profit (minus Paypal fees etc)

**apparently I cannot post URLs or images...**

You'll notice that in ~ September, sales slowed dramatically. I mulled it over and then dropped the price from $24 to $18. I made no other changes and announced the price drop exactly the same way I announced it when it launched for the first time – one tweet from the icons account, one retweet from me personally.

Here’s the point: even if you suck hard at marketing and have a comparatively small ‘network’, it’s still possible to build something that generates ongoing and maintenance-free income month after month after month. Worth it? I think so.

Good job

play your strengths, cover your weaknesses. know thy self.