More impressive than the gross number is the 4x growth in Freckle subscription billing YTD, that is outstanding - $3k to $12k in 10 months.
Lesson learned from experience - when you've got a tiger by the tail like that drop everything, hyper focus on marketing, experiment with paid promotion, partnerships, affiliates, a/b testing, etc.
If you maintain your revenue growth rate for another year you can do anything else you want, and it's a great product that's got the ability to scale.
This is a great transparent article on how much Amy Hoy has made through her various products this year. I'd love to see more of these types of posts!
Amy is well regarded in the web community (notably the Rails/JavaScript/Design communities), and she has several different types of products here (information products, subscription services and seminars). I'd bet they each serve as a marketing vehicle for one another, and I can only guess she'll continue to do better and better each year.
Congrats Amy, and thanks for such an honest behind-the-scenes post!
Did I miss something or did $130,000 come from workshops rather than products? To me workshops aren't where I want to spend my time if I'm developing products. They are too time intensive and costly. The gross amount is nice but I suspect the actual income is a lot less.
It appears to me that workshops are a good, high-margin offering to create short-term revenue in the early months/years of a product business. Workshops aren't all that scalable, but they don't need to be, if you're building a product business alongside.
That income is from about 20 days total of teaching. The main course we developed on 2009. There is some time to market and update, but you've got to admit, that's a ludicrously good ROI.
That said, like Kyle said, and my article said, it's not where I want to be forever. But training is still a product.
A product (as defined by me) is something you build once and sell. That could be an ebook, an SaaS web app, or some kind of widget. It could even be access to workshops you've recorded. But training people in person or live online is not a product.
You might say it's simply a matter of semantics, but I think it's an important distinction. Services don't scale like products because you are limited by the amount of time you're available to perform said service.
Keep in mind I'm not trying to take away from your success. It's a good blog post–I simply find the title and use of the word "product" inaccurate.
Training is a hybrid offering. It is not strictly a service and it is not strictly a product. Companies with large training offerings do not run them out of consulting regions. Training doesn't scale the same way consulting does, and its valuations aren't calculated the same way.
Specifically:
* A huge portion of the expense of training is in courseware development, which is a one-time expense.
* With solid courseware, the cost of a someone to deliver training is substantially less than the cost of a consulting domain expert for the problem domain of the course.
* The daily rate on a training course is substantially higher, worked back to $/billable-hour, than for consulting --- despite the fact that trainers are often cheaper than consultants.
* Sophisticated training operations (eg, pure-play training firms) can front-load and back-load training engagements with self-service courseware and with automated skills assessments tests, which drive billable time without an on-site consultant.
* Without a retention agreement from a single trainer, a package of courseware, self-service web applications, and skills assessment has value that can be sold to another training company.
In some sense, you can take any application that you yourself host and call it a "service". There isn't a bright-light dividing line between the two, or, at least, not a useful one. Regardless, it is not fair to lump training in with straight-up consulting.
If you sell a product -- with no subscription & no support -- but customers wont buy unless you do several in-person sales meetings, it's still a product.
I decide when and where to put on workshops. Then people pay me to show up. It's a product.
To me, you just defined the distinction further. Anyone on a company's sales staff can do an in-person sales meeting and sell a product. Want to sell more product next month? Hire and train more sales staff.
But only Amy Hoy can teach a seminar by Amy Hoy. People are paying for your specific knowledge/reputation. You have a fixed amount of time every month and cannot be in two places at once.
You are stuck on the semantics of the word "by" in "Seminar by Amy Hoy". A salesperson would absolutely sell "A Magical Evening of Amy Hoy Brought To You By One Of Our Talented Trainers". They in fact do it all the time.
Of course, Mrs. Hoy can do a lot of things to make it even easier to disintermediate herself from the course. But she doesn't really even need to.
I really don't know much about Amy Hoy. Nice hat. But I've watched a fair bit of training get sold (software security training is a fairly hot item, and we've built courseware and delivered training to some pretty large companies), and I think you're off base here.
Have you considered rolling any of the teaching content into an ebook or other type of self-serve information product? That might be an interesting way of leveraging the content you've collated into something that continues to sell even if you don't feel like getting up in front of someone.
And to those saying workshops aren't "products" well I'd argue they straddle the product/service line. Since you're creating a content package and then presenting it. Lots of the material from workshops can be re-sold or re-presented over and over. Vs pure services which you are creating on demand each time.
> Money is a tool for me — I want more money to hire people full-time, to pay for some boutique development work I want done, to do a few personal things I want to do. I want to be able to work with my dream team (and they don’t come cheap). That sorta thing.
Love that. More money can equal hiring more money, commissioning more art, hiring better trainers so you can learn faster, buying better tools, funding science and research, traveling more and easier, doing more and greater charity, and otherwise good things. I always thought it's silly when people go out of their way to say, "I'd never need more than $xx,xxx." Okay, you wouldn't need it, but with the least little bit of creativity, there's a lot of good and cool things you could do with it. Money's a terrible master, but a pretty good servant.
It would be good to make that more clear in the article. The paragraph about 30×500 gives the impression that that income is being shared, since you point out that the YoH income is your share of it.
That's because I have no plans to share the 30x500 income with anyone yet. Alex isn't charging me for he material he contributed to the last version since I'm doing all the upkeep. :) He may or may not be joining me in a guest teacher role but we haven't decided yet!
I don't really think so. When you are selling products it's specifically different than a salary.
If I sold 10k widgets for $10 a piece and said my business made a 100k last year, ignoring rent, cost of widget and labor, that would definitely be misleading.
Besides, there are still taxes paid on top of whatever they did bring in, so it really doesn't fit your cute analogy. They paid free lancers, etc.
I mean I don't care, but "How much do you make" has built into the question the idea that everyone who gets a salary pays taxes, etc. When you are talking about a business 'making money' it is built into the question that there are costs associated with it.
You may be technically correct, but if I rolled all the money back into salaries & dev, and profited zero, people would still want to know the $216k number - because anyone could make $0 in profit :)
That said, I have $60k just sitting in my bank account right now - and it feels goooood.
Fair, I'll try to be more clear next time. I was bristling at the idea that people think I was being misleading, when the reality is, that's the word I think in, cuz I am not an accountant. I pay somebody else to think about that for me ;)
You have to pay social security on every dime up to $120,000 you personally make. Doesn't matter if you make it through an Sole Proprietorship, LLC, C-Corp or S-Corp.
Although in Amy's case, she may not have to pay any living in Vienna. But I'm sure the US Gov't get it's share.
If you try to declare that all the money you pulled from your LLC was dividends and not a salary, the IRS will bust you. Once you declare a 'fair' amount as salary (and pay FICA), the rest you can pull without paying FICA.
Lesson learned from experience - when you've got a tiger by the tail like that drop everything, hyper focus on marketing, experiment with paid promotion, partnerships, affiliates, a/b testing, etc.
If you maintain your revenue growth rate for another year you can do anything else you want, and it's a great product that's got the ability to scale.