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.
Here's the way I look at infoproducts (other than from a love of teaching, which I obviously have): http://unicornfree.com/2012/be-your-own-angel-how-to-make-mo...
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.