11 Passive Income Ideas for Software Engineers

[00:00] So you're a software engineer and maybe you're looking for a little side hustle income. The good thing is, because of the internet, there are tons of ways to make money as a software engineer without actually doing software engineering. And more good news, a lot of these means

[00:14] are passive or fairly passive. I know for me personally, now that I'm self-employed, I'm thinking a lot, how can I make money? And so I wanted to share with you today my 11 best passive income ideas for software engineers. Full disclosure, some of these are things I've tried

[00:29] in some are haven't and where they are things that I have tried. I'll go ahead and tell you my experience and my results. One other caveat I wanted to mention is that as with anything on the internet today, doing it is easier with an audience. And so your mileage may vary depending on what kind

[00:45] of audience you have. And when it comes to making money online, it's just a whole lot easier if you have the attention of people. So consider that something of a warning and just a way to kind of appropriately set the bar for yourself. There are timestamps in the description below, so feel

[00:59] free to skip around at your convenience and let's go ahead and get into it. Okay, first idea and that is info products. Info products are a great way to make passive income as a software engineer, because this is basically just turning your knowledge into an artifact and selling that artifact.

[01:14] And as with code and media leverage, you make it once and you can sell it infinitely. And I think that's pretty awesome. Examples of things you could sell here are PDFs, ebooks, courses, cohort

[01:26] based courses, memberships. The possibilities are really endless, but as I mentioned, it's a lot easier to make significant money selling info products when you already have an audience. And full disclosure for me, I have two products on Gumroad right now. One is free and one is paid and they're both

[01:42] kind of ebooks, but they have video components with them. And last year, I made 26 sales for a total of $138. So as I mentioned, it's hard to achieve enormous scale unless you have a significant audience

[01:54] because these are kind of one-off not recurring purchases, but it's totally passive like I mentioned and I think it's a pretty great revenue stream if you can manage to get it in front of people and have a decent conversion rate. Okay, our second idea and that is blogging. Now, blogging may sound

[02:10] a little of fashion and you may think that they have the blog is kind of gone that we moved on to other things, but I think having a solid blog with really valuable content with backlinks and SEO traction is incredibly valuable and shouldn't be overlooked. A blog is valuable for a lot of reasons,

[02:26] I think number one, it can help you establish a personal brand and number two, if you can get some of that SEO traction, I mentioned, then that could be another source of kind of getting your thing in front of people. So I'm not a blogging expert, but I do have a few ideas in this space and so maybe

[02:41] I'll circle back around and update you guys once I launch these projects, but suffice to say for now don't overlook blogging when you're thinking about ways to make passive income online. Our third idea is related to blogging and that is affiliate sites and what are affiliate sites? So affiliate

[02:56] sites would be sites that are centered around a certain class or type of product that may be review that product and then have affiliate links in the blog post that people click through. Now, the thing with affiliate sites is you need significant traffic in order to make any kind of decent money

[03:11] because Amazon's affiliate program pays pennies on the dollar. I don't think it's very significant from what I've heard, but I think these are still pretty good ways to make money online and so I think as an example, the foremost kind of example that most people would know is Wirecutter, which was bought

[03:27] by the New York Times and so Wirecutter did reviews of products and kind of bought everything, kind of relentlessly tested these products and had basically the gold standard for product reviews and they monetized and part through affiliate links and so that's just an example, but you can niche down

[03:45] infinitely on these so you could do a blog reviewing boats or reviewing lawn mowers or grills or really anything and I think kind of a niche affiliate marketing website would be a pretty good way for a lot of people to get started and you can also acquire these on websites like Flip-A. So consider that

[04:02] when you're thinking about passive income strategies. Our fourth passive income strategy is YouTube and YouTube I think is not a secret to most people at this point, you monetize it through a lot of the means that we've already mentioned so principally through ads and through affiliates and the thing about

[04:18] YouTube is number one, it's not completely passive because in order to kind of keep your channel healthy and continue to drive views you need to be continuing to make videos like I'm doing right now and so that's part of it and the other part of YouTube is that it's an extremely long game so

[04:32] know for me personally and for most people it takes tens maybe not hundreds but maybe over a hundred videos to see any kind of significant traction most people when they start out don't know anything about cameras I didn't don't know anything about editing I still don't know that much about editing

[04:48] and so it's tough in and not sure it's tough and so I just want to be realistic about that for people and kind of like Gumroad unless you have this significant audience it's hard to make money at YouTube so just looking at my analytics here I was able to monetize in late January of 2022

[05:05] and so far I'm filming on April 6th and I've made 269 dollars and 48 cents so you can see it's tough to make significant money on YouTube like I mentioned and so it's an interesting revenue stream

[05:19] I think it's brought a lot of interesting things into my life and allow me to meet interesting people but as a significant income source you're not going to be making a full-time living on it unless you're like MKBHD whose channel is mostly funded by adsense when you are in kind of those tech and

[05:35] personal finance faces the amount that YouTube pays you for ads on your channel is more typically and so it kind of depends a little bit on what niche you're in but the long story short is that this is just tough it's tough to compete and I do it because I really enjoy it but I just want

[05:51] to be realistic about what these struggles are like and the fact that it's not completely passive our fifth passive income idea is the holy grail for developers and that is building a sass talked about building a sass in the past and it's the holy grail for a reason and that is because

[06:07] it's really hard and I don't think it's completely passive I think it's tempting to see monthly recurring revenue for a product that you've built once as passive but I think the reality of owning an operating sass is that you have customers to speak with and deal with you have bugs to fix

[06:22] hopefully you have new features to add and you're looking for ways to compete in your market and so I don't think running a sass is completely passive if it were then Dropbox wouldn't have to hire any engineers right so I think it's just important to be realistic about the challenges of this

[06:37] but I think if you have a kind of small niche sass that has a limited feature set and is pretty free from bugs and has good procedures that are outlined then the income from a sass could be pretty passive so keep all these things in mind as you're considering various passive income

[06:53] ideas one other thing to consider about sass is that it has a high time and capital risk usually and so I would suggest really trying to validate demand as best as you can and even charging for pre sales to ensure that people are willing to pull out their credit card to buy whatever software

[07:08] it is that you're selling so just keep that in mind our next passive income idea is related to running a sass but on a smaller scale and that is micro sass and I think this is a great option for people that are interested in selling software but maybe don't want the hassle or the headaches or the scale

[07:23] of a fully fledged sass app you could sell a micro sass and what is an example of a micro sass app this could be a Shopify app or a GitHub app or a Chrome plugin or a Google Sheets plugin. In fact I just made a video about how my personal finance software is basically a Google Sheets app

[07:40] it's called tiller it is awesome and I think there are many many things that you could do with a Google Sheets plugin and so I would consider looking into these things maybe look on micro acquire or flippa and try and buy one or try and maybe clone one or come up with a use case for yourself

[07:55] and build one. I'm personally very interested in this space and so I might make a video in the future with updates about any particular ideas that I try to pursue but the long story short is this shouldn't be overlooked if you want to sell software which I do then I think this could be a good

[08:10] entry point so go ahead and go out there and see what's selling and then build something perhaps our seventh idea I actually saw on the contrarian thinking website and so I wanted to give credit where credit is do thank you to Cody Sanchez for all the great content she puts out there and this particular

[08:26] idea is acquiring a social account and then using that account to either sell things directly to the audience or to use affiliate so I mentioned that having an audience is key and I found that building an audience is a very long hard game and so you can potentially pay in order to skip some of those

[08:44] hard steps and just get the audience you're basically paying the person that's done all the work to build the audience and so you can go out and maybe acquire a Facebook group or an Instagram account and then you could assuming you are targeting the right niche sell products that are related to that

[09:00] niche so let's say me for example I'm a software engineer I feel like I understand software engineers until I could go out and buy hopefully maybe an Instagram account that is targeted toward developers and then maybe I could come up with my own courses to sell them or sell existing courses or have

[09:17] affiliate links to other courses like West Boss for example and that would be I think a perfectly good strategy so this is something that developers don't talk about very much but I've mentioned a few times acquisition I think acquisition is number one a cool idea number two can help you kind of skip

[09:32] that validation step and kind of hit the ground running if you can come and bring ideas of how you might improve something to a product or service that could be a very good option so consider this when you're thinking about how to build passive income alright idea is merch and merch is pretty

[09:47] self-explanatory but the thing about it is it's not completely passive so you have to get orders and then pick items fulfill them ship them and so there's some work that comes with this but I think there are probably some third parties out there that can make it a little bit more tenable my favorite example

[10:03] of a developer who's done this is West Boss and his stickers let me grab one so this is one example of a sticker from a West Boss pack so every so often he will send stickers or he'll open up his stickers

[10:16] and allow you to purchase them these were five dollars and they came and it's great and I think that's kind of a cool little thing you can do that's pretty unique and fun and so consider doing some kind of merch I personally don't want to sell sweatshirts but I think stuff like stickers or other items like

[10:32] mugs things like that are kind of cool so that is one more option for you our ninth passive income option is to offer a service on fiber and I know what you're thinking you're thinking that sounds completely not passive but I think there is an opportunity to bake some passive elements into this

[10:47] so I think if you provide a service that you can document and kind of create a process around then that creates an opportunity to kind of create an agency around this service so we might call this creating a fiber agency so let's say you do one page marketing sites you can maybe develop a few

[11:04] of the sites on your own first and then go out and hire or outsource to a developer and then you're kind of just doing biz dev or marketing or whatever trying to get this service in front of people on fiber ensuring the quality of the delivery but then you've kind of taken yourself out of that

[11:20] delivery part of the process and in doing so you're able to hire and you can kind of scale this beyond yourself so it's not completely passive but I think it's a cool idea and it's maybe something that I'm going to mess around with here soon there's a great Skillshare course out there from Matt Brighton

[11:36] on how to have a winning fiber offer or service so I would suggest that if you're at all interested our last two ideas are very developing and I think they're pretty cool so number 10 is a component library so I think the best known example of this is tailwind UI so you may be familiar with

[11:53] tailwind CSS and the guys that created it they also created these UI library components that you can buy additionally and kind of use with tailwind so tailwind is free to use its open source

[12:05] but then the components are paid and so I think that's a pretty interesting way to monetize a group of people that are already using and really like tailwind and the people that created it already have huge followings but even if you're not them I think there's a lot of opportunity to create components

[12:20] and potentially sell them so if you have a group of related components that you may be used in a project you can kind of pull them out and then either put them on npm if there's a way to get that or kind of just sell a zip file of those components and I think that would be a pretty cool way to kind of sell

[12:36] your sawdust so I'm big on selling your sawdust that just means selling things that are kind of the byproducts of things that you're already doing and so I think this is a very cool way of doing that assuming you can kind of have either a high utility component library or high design fidelity component

[12:52] library ideally both but I would consider doing this if you've a side project that you've done a lot of custom development for consider how you can extract the components and maybe sell them and our last idea goes right along with this and that is selling boiler place so I think the best example

[13:07] I found of this is from this guy Kyle Gauley and he has this app called Gravity and it's not really an app it's really just a boiler plate for SaaS products and react and Node.js and so this is a

[13:19] great thing because in most projects you spend a ton of time just doing the setup I know from working in an agency myself it's like you kick a project off and it just takes time to get all the various pieces set up and we even had boiler plates and it still takes time so imagine how much time

[13:35] that a really good boiler plate is saving you from having to go and pick all the tools and pick all the technologies and do all the setup and do the deployment this makes it a lot easier and it works with a bunch of different kinds of technologies and databases and so I would say if you have some kind

[13:49] of boilerplate that you use to kick off your projects or you have a particular stack that you like there's for a specific kind of project so I mentioned gravity is for SaaS apps then consider kind of bundling that up maybe selling it on Gumroad I think boiler plates are really underrated so

[14:06] I think this could be a really great strategy for you to go ahead and start making some passive income okay that's it those are my 11 passive income ideas for software developers I'd love to know what you think I'd love to know if I missed anything or maybe there are things out there that I should

[14:20] be considering that I haven't so leave me a comment below if you have a source of passive income online that's been significant for you or that you really like and thanks so much for watching to the end if you're still here you'd probably like the rest of my channel which focuses on software

[14:33] engineering and self-employment so consider subscribing remember stay hungry stay curious and I'll see you in the next one