Designers residual income
- Started
- Last post
- 13 Responses
- Hue
Just been thinking about possible residual income possibilities - e.g selling templates, vectors ect. Has anyone had much experience of this? Does it actually create a good income? Are there many opportunities out there for templates ect or is it a saturated market? Some personal experiences would be interesting...
- utopian0
Unfortunately you are very late to the party. The industry is over saturated with Giga-tons of cheap stock: photos, illys, icons, vectors, etc... that are ALL very cheap and or FREE.
- fyoucher10
Some folks on Envato make pretty good cash doing that (i.e. six figures). I guess if you can create something useful that's not out there yet, that a bunch of folks want...then it could be. But like Utopian said, there's already tons of folks doing that.
- vsplus0
I think these guys are selling vectors they created for some other projects but I don't know about the income.
http://actualobjects.com
- Hue0
Hmm... I was just thinking of anything like this really. E.g stock images, vectors, themes, icons, do you think there are any avenues for designers to have a residual income? Any good stories or bad experiences from people who have tried it?
- Maaku0
I tried with my own apparel company (t-shirts, belts, etc...)
Similar to stock: OVER SATURATED.
- Hue0
I just thought this might be an interesting issue to discuss with fellow designers - if there really are other avenues of income out there. I guess there are also people who blog/ give away free stuff and have advertising on their site, does this work? Anyone have much experience of this?
- well if one of us has a great idea to make money we are not gonna tell you are we?fadein11
- randommail0
Other sources of income?
I devoted myself to my creative career for the past 12 years. As soon as I started seeing steady profits I bought real estate. 2 properties. One for me and one to rent. I see about $1000/month in "extra" income.
- < never failsMaaku
- was it tough getting into that? do you have to maintain the house you're renting out yoursel?scarabin
- I bought two rental properties this year. Got the second one 2 days ago. Both paid off. I need some renters! :DCanHasQBN
- This is rarely passive income, often requires some maintenance and can get tricky depending on country.raf
- I looked for updated places, to keep maintenance issues low. Both places are newly remodeled.CanHasQBN
- you can also pay a company a small fee to take care of your rentals if you aren't able to or if you live far.CanHasQBN
- Never fails is not accurate. It depends on the region/market. And as others mentioned there are carrying costs. Taxes, water, services, repair/upkeep. Do your research first.Josev
- water, services, repair/upkeep. Do your research first.Josev
- HOA takes care of most major repairs (roof, a/c, pipes, landscape, even blanket insurance).CanHasQBN
- Condos. The maintenance is the unit interior, so VERY minimal. I haven't needed to repair anything in the past 4 years.randommail
- ... in the past 4 years.
Renting a house would probably be too much for me.randommail
- scarabin0
you're sitting on a goldmine
- raf0
While some people blog about their passive income and do earning reports, most will stay quiet about it. It's not like they miss competition.
Make something people would want. Solve a problem.
- A font management/grouping/tagging extension for Photoshop.
- Media asset management tool for WordPress (any actively updated blog older than a year must have a complete mess in its files).I was happy to pay $50 for http://www.advancedcustomfields.… for 2 ACF plugin extensions. I hope the guy is doing well with those.
- ACF is more than worth the price of the add ons. He definitely deserves to do well from it.Nathan_Adams
- vaxorcist0
I can imagine some sort of event management signup engine with heavily re-arrangeable fields and sub-questions.... done nicely in jquery with nicely formatted reports... this would do well as a wordpress plugin, we used to write them from scratch for things like golf tournaments, HUGE time and cost, but largely due to constant new requests from clients... if it's some sort of "engine" the tweeks can either be done easily, or refused gracefully because "it's not part of the engine we paid lunch money for, you have to spend $10k on that"
- I'd do it, but I burned out of writing signup form engine scripts a while ago due to constant change requests....vaxorcist
- ...strokes chin...
hmmm.. I'm actually at my happiest doing nasty tedious form based shit.mikotondria3
- cbass990
good read
- 23kon0
If you're putting something into an already saturated market then your stuff has to far outshine the rest or be lucky with hype to get a good income from something you've created.
Raf is right, make something people will want, think of a product/idea/app you need or would like in your life that doesn't exist.
You could spend months or years of your life developing the most complex iphone app only for it to not sell.
Or you could spend a day being the first at making something unique and make millions from it.e.g Joel Comm's iFart App was banking $10,000 a day back in 2008! He made millions from it! A simple app that had a button that played a fart noise when you pressed it.
Lots of copycat apps followed and even some of them managed to bag a lot of money out of it.
I'd guess that by now though the market is well and truly saturated though.