The blog post's title might seem a bit clickbaity, but I got you. You want to find out how I plan to reach $1,000 USD monthly recurring revenue this year, and maybe it will inspire you too. For probably billions of other people and me, passive income is a dream. A dream that can help you make money while you sleep. Imagine what you can do with all that money. Pay a new mortgage, invest in stocks, invest in crypto, invest in yourself etc., the possibilities are endless. Usually, once you reach $1,000 USD monthly recurring revenue, it's a bit easier to grow it to a double or triple amount. $1,000 USD might not sound like a lot of money for some people, but it isn't easy to make when not exchanging your time for money. Why this amount and not more or less? I had lots of entrepreneurial failures, some with a decent amount of success, but I could never make more than a few hundred dollars as a passive income. This amount is the first step to achieve before dreaming of bigger things. How do I plan to make $1,000 every month as a passive income? Before I start to explain, let’s do some simple math exercises. To make $1,000 USD every month, I need: Customers Amount ( USD ) Total ( USD ) 35 29 1015 20 50 1000 10 100 1000 4 250 1000 2 500 1000 Looking at this data, you might tell yourself that selling something for a high price is a no-brainer. “Do I really want to have all the eggs in one basket?". Imagine two people every month that pay me $500 each, and one decides to churn. That's a 50% income drop. Do I have a sellable problem-solution if I can't find 2 or 4 people in a niche of thousands willing to pay me a few hundred dollars for something? Now that we have an idea about the number of customers I need every month let's discuss ways. My day-to-day job is as a mobile developer. I make a decent amount of money, I can't complain, but I want to make money without selling my time. What can I do to achieve my goal? Trade stocks ( Outside of my area of interest ) Invest in an offline business Create a course Make a software as a service mobile or web app I will exclude stocks right from the start because even if fintech is something that I like as a domain, dealing with stocks and trading is not something that I would like to do. An offline business This seems like a good idea from all four items, but I’m not sure that it is. It requires capital upfront. You cannot create an offline business that can generate $1,000 every month without investing money. For example, you might have costs with equipment or rent or people. Remember that if I want to make passive income, I need to automate everything, which might require training people. An offline business sounds complicated, so let’s ignore it for now. Create a course I love to help people. Last year, I created a free Android mentorship program for three months where several people applied; four started, but only one finished ( This is a topic for a different story ) While I love to help people, I’m not sure that teaching is a big passion. I do not see myself recording 10 hours of videos, editing them, and then renewing the topics on the course because it’s hard to make evergreen content on a topic that I have a good understanding of. I can make maybe written lessons that I can sell, but are courses evergreen? From what I saw from different people, they usually make a capped amount over the years. Of course, I’m not saying it’s terrible, because I would like to get 10,000 USD on a course launch day, but this usually requires a big audience. ( Which I plan to also make in the following months ) Who knows, but I do not feel that selling courses can help me achieve my passive income goal. Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman from Stackingthebricks might disagree with me, and who knows, maybe I’ll create a course in the following months. Make a software as a service app As a software developer, it’s easier for me to build things. The hard part comes when I want to sell it. Why? I don’t think I have an explanation. It’s probably the impostor syndrome that hits me, and I feel that my product is not good enough. Anyway, this year I plan to change this. I’ll build a few apps and then market as much as possible. Maybe it will take off from the first one, or I’ll fail. I want to take an existing already successful app, build a similar app with just one feature, launch it, and then market as much as I can. I have a few ideas in mind, and recently, I started to look into SwiftUi as I’m already familiar with Android. So my next app will be an Android and iOS app. What do I need to reach my goal? I need a decent MVP app that: Does one thing good. Solves a problem and saves 2 - 3 hours for someone per month. Has a median subscription of 29 $. I’ll probably have different pricing tiers, but I set this hypothetically. Has 35 paying customers every month. If I build a mobile app with 10,000 users across Android and iOS, I only need a conversion of around 0.35%, which is probably very low. A standard conversion is around 1-2%. Conclusion I might make this sound very easy, but I know it’s not. I have a goal in my mind and I will do my best to achieve it this year. I know there are a lot of unknowns, but I will do my best to solve every problem that I find in my way. What is your goal in 2022? If you feel that you can learn something from my indie journey, please or on my personal website: follow me on Twitter dragosivanov.com
