The Reality of Passive Income: Side Project Edition

I Fell for "Make Money While You Sleep"

I watched a YouTube video titled "Developer earns 3 million won/month from side projects." Build a SaaS, collect subscription fees, and you've got passive income. Your server makes money while you're sound asleep. A sweet narrative.

I started two years ago. The punchline: total revenue over two years was 1.27 million won. That's an average of 53,000 won per month. Far from making money in my sleep -- I was up all night not making money.

Project 1: Developer Portfolio Builder

My first side project was a SaaS that makes it easy to create developer portfolio sites. Connect GitHub, pull in projects, pick a template, deploy.

Took three months to build. 6-8 hours every weekend. After launch, I posted it on Product Hunt and got 83 signups in the first week. Paid conversions: 2. At $4.99/month. Monthly revenue: $9.98. About 13,000 won in Korean money.

"You can do everything you need with the free tier -- why would I pay?" was the user consensus. The paid features weren't differentiated enough. Custom domain was the premium feature, but GitHub Pages does that for free. (Why didn't I think of this before launch?)

Project 2: Code Snippet Manager Chrome Extension

Six months later, I started a second project. A Chrome extension for saving and searching code snippets. This time I did some market research. There were 5 similar tools, but they all had ugly UIs or were slow.

Free version capped at 50 snippets, premium was unlimited plus team sharing. $3.99/month.

Shipped in two months. 412 installs. 7 paid conversions. Monthly revenue: $27.93. About 36,000 won. Better than the portfolio builder, but still coffee money.

Why Doesn't It Work

Both projects shared the same mistake: I built what I wanted to build, not what people would pay for. "Don't developers need this?" was a flawed assumption. There's a difference between needing something and being willing to pay for it.

I also couldn't market. Posted on Product Hunt and shared on Twitter. That was it. Expecting a product to spread on its own without sustained marketing was naive. I spent less than 10% of my development time on marketing.

The truth is, the word "passive" itself is a fantasy. SaaS isn't passive. Bug fixes, customer support, infrastructure management, feature updates -- even with 100 users, you're looking at 2-3 hours per week on maintenance.

What Remains

I earned 1.27 million won. If I calculated the hourly rate... better not to. Honestly, the hourly rate of a convenience store part-time job would be higher.

But I learned a lot technically. Stripe payment integration, Chrome extension development, landing page optimization, Google Analytics. Things I'd never do at my day job, I did through side projects. This actually helped in job interviews.

If I Did It Again

Validate demand before building. Create a landing page first and collect emails. If 100 people sign up, then start development.

Target B2B. B2C conversion is brutally hard. Getting $4.99/month from individuals is way harder than getting $49/month from companies.

Spend half of development time on marketing. "Good products market themselves" is a lie.

Passive income doesn't exist. "Actively managed supplementary revenue" is the accurate term. Accept this and your expectations become realistic, and realistic expectations create sustainable motivation. And yet, I still catch myself thinking "this time it'll work" while brainstorming new project ideas.