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