Freckle's earning the better part of $400k/yr… not sure how that's "somewhat less." Did 30x500 bring in the same money as Freckle in 2012? Yeah, but that's after a lot of neglect of Freckle… which we're rectifying.[1]
Infoproducts are no less hard than software products, by the by… not if you put in the effort to make good ones. They're faster, yes, but not easier. It's not merely "sitting down and writing words" any more than creating good software is merely "sitting down and typing code."
Also, developers are not my audience (for Freckle). I doubt there are very many of "us" (Hacker News types) who use Freckle.
[1] (And the neglect of Freckle was due to focus on Charm, not my infoproduct biz. Which, on the balance, was a mistake, but boy did I learn from it!)
EDIT:
> And what's worse is it feels like the only people we hear about finding success are those that are selling to us.
That's because you don't venture out of your comfort zone. Naturally, the people you hang out with are the people you'll hear from. I, otoh, belong a lot of different, even weird communities, and I know people making a fantastic living off Wordpress plugins, design themes, social media how-to videos, healthy & super simple cooking classes, etc. I recently met a lady who grosses 7 figures a year on dog agility training products. (She's a respected industry expert; we're not talking Teach Your Parrot to Talk here.)
Get out of your comfort zone / fishbowl and it won't be so "weird."
I just wanted to say, I appreciate the response and I wasn't trying to be accusatory here. I guess what frustrates me is, personally speaking, I don't want to sell info products. And like many other people, I don't want to consult either. So I start to get dejected when it seems like those are the only real routes to success. Freckle definitely doesn't fit the pattern I was seeing (I vaguely knew it was doing well, but that's amazing).
This is a weird complaint. You're getting depressed because the things that the world wants and rewards with value are things you don't want to do? Aren't you saying that you don't want to do what other people value, but (implicitly) you still want to enjoy the results of doing valuable work?
A good point, and I have struggled with this idea alot. But, I don't think you can simply look at "what the world wants" as the final word. I think you have to temper that with what might be good for the world. My guess would be that the person with the complaint is really expressing their feeling that information products aren't doing something good for people. I haven't consumed any, so I can't say.
You don't have to do infoproducts. Who's telling you that you do? Not sure where you're getting this idea from. Because Brennan's current income is mostly from his book & courses? Because he used that money to free himself that much faster? But he never said it was the only way.
I got to leave consulting twice as fast because I decided that teaching was a much better way to spend my time. And it was. Teaching pays dividends that you can't imagine, beyond the simple revenue.
As for Freckle, $400k/yr is amazing? Not hardly. If we hadn't made the mistakes we have made, I bet it'd be a $1 m/yr biz already. All my semi-major competitors must be making at least 5x-10x that per year (at least!). I've met some of them at confs; the Harvest guys I met a couple years before I ever did anything with Freckle, and I suspect they were making more then than we did now.
There are tons of popular, quiet SaaS successes, all around you. (Also people selling UI kits, themes, plugins, resource kits, and dev libraries. I have a friend making $10-15k/mo on an iOS component, last I heard. Not to mention live workshops, which are both impactful and very profitable.)
I have a lot of friends who don't write, who don't usually speak, etc., who write about business in general but don't share numbers… who run successful SaaS businesses in the $300k-3 million/year range.
Here's the thing: those friends don't share like I do -- because they don't have "preach the good news" as a personal mission (as I do, as Brennan, Patrick, etc. do) -- and so you assume they're not there. Your whole argument is predicated on the 10% of the "big picture" that somebody has come to you and handed to you, pre-chewed and spelled out.
I mean this kindly so please take it in the manner it's intended: I see this kind of attitude a lot. "But I don't WANT to do xyz [which nobody ever said I had to do, but about which they merely said 'here's what I do']. SOMETHING IS FISHY/unfair/sketchy/dishonest/a rip-off." Assuming nobody is saying "You have to do it this way," this is a kind of ego-freak-out that your subconscious designed to give you an excuse to maintain your status quo. The ego is a slippery, slippery creature.
Infoproducts are no less hard than software products, by the by… not if you put in the effort to make good ones. They're faster, yes, but not easier. It's not merely "sitting down and writing words" any more than creating good software is merely "sitting down and typing code."
Also, developers are not my audience (for Freckle). I doubt there are very many of "us" (Hacker News types) who use Freckle.
[1] (And the neglect of Freckle was due to focus on Charm, not my infoproduct biz. Which, on the balance, was a mistake, but boy did I learn from it!)
EDIT:
> And what's worse is it feels like the only people we hear about finding success are those that are selling to us.
That's because you don't venture out of your comfort zone. Naturally, the people you hang out with are the people you'll hear from. I, otoh, belong a lot of different, even weird communities, and I know people making a fantastic living off Wordpress plugins, design themes, social media how-to videos, healthy & super simple cooking classes, etc. I recently met a lady who grosses 7 figures a year on dog agility training products. (She's a respected industry expert; we're not talking Teach Your Parrot to Talk here.)
Get out of your comfort zone / fishbowl and it won't be so "weird."