Agreed, which is a shame, because I like the idea and he seems to be truly delivering value. The title, however, is over-promising rather than over-delivering.
Fair enough. A lot of people would probably define passive income differently, but I see what you're getting at. I hope the entire comments section of this post doesn't turn into only a debate about what qualifies as passive income because I'm actually really interested in what you've done and would like to see some good discussion about that.
"I spend 3-5 hours every single day and come up with the best freelance jobs of the day from all over the web. I painstakingly hand-craft this list every day."
We try really hard to come up with ways to use technology to create value, but there are heaps of opportunities like this one to curate a product by hand and deliver value derived from your knowledge and experience, rather than some clever hacking.
Are you getting any feedback from your users on a lead by lead basis about the quality of the leads? Like, the ability for them to rate the leads they pursue? It would be interesting to see if getting such feedback could improve the quality/efficiency of your lead-finding abilities.
Interesting, but doesn't it scale kind of badly? Imagine if thousands of devs were using the service, then it would get really competitive to get any of these leads, thus lowering the value of the leads for the devs.
Ok - it looks like commenters are unable to see why he calls this "passive income".
It's because although the work is done by hand, he can eventually (in like a month) hand it off to his own employee or contractor for them to do for a fraction of the profits.
Starting it up himself allows him to formularize the entire business, build a following and keep costs low in the beginning. He probably also plans to start creating similar email lists for other verticals with high levels of contractor work - so not just developers, but also designers, devops etc.
If you read between the lines, you can see where he's going with this; it can absolutely be a passive income stream, and based on his traction, it may replace his need to work.
Edit: To commenters below - Most successful businesses eventually hire someone to run them w/o much intervention from the investors/founders. He can do the same.
Handing off work to employees is not passive income, or every business owner in the world would be "passive income". It's just a standard product business.
CEOs are employees, and stocks are considered passive income. Granted, he might still have to be on the "board", but he could get pretty close to passive income.
To spell this out: Most successful businesses eventually hire someone to run them w/o much intervention from the investors/founders. He can do the same.
> He probably also plans to start creating similar email lists for other verticals with high levels of contractor work - so not just developers, but also designers, devops etc.
This is what I'm interested in, although I'm pretty sure he said his product is actually for designers, not devs. I'd love to see something similar for devs.
The words you're looking for are "I'm making money with a product that has fixed costs and variable income", not passive income. It's a pretty well known model used by a number of companies such as Microsoft.
You're also selling 'mining picks', so I'd guess your product has a lot of potential.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 68.7 ms ] threadSo it's not really passive income, is it?
This would seem to contradict the term 'passive'.
It's because although the work is done by hand, he can eventually (in like a month) hand it off to his own employee or contractor for them to do for a fraction of the profits.
Starting it up himself allows him to formularize the entire business, build a following and keep costs low in the beginning. He probably also plans to start creating similar email lists for other verticals with high levels of contractor work - so not just developers, but also designers, devops etc.
If you read between the lines, you can see where he's going with this; it can absolutely be a passive income stream, and based on his traction, it may replace his need to work.
Edit: To commenters below - Most successful businesses eventually hire someone to run them w/o much intervention from the investors/founders. He can do the same.
To spell this out: Most successful businesses eventually hire someone to run them w/o much intervention from the investors/founders. He can do the same.
This is what I'm interested in, although I'm pretty sure he said his product is actually for designers, not devs. I'd love to see something similar for devs.
You're also selling 'mining picks', so I'd guess your product has a lot of potential.