How Our Self-Employed Household Has Diversified its Revenue Streams
/I live in a self-employed household - I’ve been working independently since 2017 as a brand and content strategist. My husband Joe, since early 2020 (just pre-pandemic!) as an independent developer. We share an LLC, in fact.
(Our toddler Duke is self employed in trying to press ALL the little round things he perceives to be buttons.)
In our time working independently, we’ve each experimented with and grown various forms of revenue.
We’ve listed them below, with some thoughts on what has worked and what hasn’t for each.
And here’s a wider snapshot of our full revenue. As you can see, consulting takes up a large majority of it. We’re always thinking about how our new revenue streams can grow their respective piece of the piece, in order to scale our total revenue over time.
CONSULTING
Joe and I both started working independently as consultants, and this still makes up 80% or more of our income. Our work is never hourly, and always a project or monthly retainer. Generally, our consulting offerings fall into two camps:
Productized services: We’ve built templates for finite, specific scopes with set fees. It’s easy to pull these out of our back pocket without much work, when a client needs a quick win, a standardized approach to something, or clarity on their bigger goals.
Example: Adrienne conducts roadmapping sprints, where she sets a marketing roadmap over the course of 2-4 weeks. Joe offers the ability to get your iOS app in the App Store in 3 months with a standardized approach.
Customized services: We build a scope for a client that’s unique to their needs, either as a project or ongoing retainer.
PROs
Flexibility: I can scale my income up or scale my income down, based on what I want my workload to look like.
Ownership: I have ownership over what I’m paid, what I work on, and who I work with.
Support: I can support companies that may not be able to afford a full-time hire.
CONs
Time for money: We’ve put a lot of boundaries in place to avoid exchanging time for money. That said, it’s still what you’re doing at the end of the day. When we both went on parental leave in 2021, for example, those were four largely unpaid months for each of us.
Don’t work hourly, to avoid a low ceiling to how much you can make
Raise your prices for the same work as your expertise grows
Templatize your offering so you don’t need to build from the ground up with each project
RESOURCES OR INFOPRODUCTS
Adrienne sells content strategy toolkits and workshops for independent content folks who want to add this as a service.
She’s currently hard at work ramping this up from a proof of concept with about $10,000 in revenue to a steady $100,000 revenue stream, so that infoproducts can be a bigger chunk of the pie.
Content strategy toolkits: $50-$300 per toolkit
Workshop + cohort: This is a WIP, but likely about $2,000 per
PROs
Scalability: I don’t trade time for money as directly as with consulting
Connection: I can connect 1:1 with my target audience and really directly see the impact of the work
CONs
TBD, this is a regularly evolving concept
SaaS (SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE)
As a developer, Joe loves building and managing his own products based on passions and interests. He earns income from them in two ways:
Exiting SaaS: For example, Joe sold Mugshot Bot in 2021 when he was ready to invest his energy elsewhere.
Growing SaaS: For example, Joe is currently investing his time in railsdevs, which connects Ruby on Rails developers with hiring businesses. He earns a monthly subscription from businesses looking to reach out to developers, as well as a hiring fee once a hire is made.
PROs
Predictability: Recurring subscription-based pricing leads to predictable and steadily growing revenue
Bootstrapping: All profits are mine to do with what I’d like, whether that’s reinvesting in the company, donating to complementary causes, or taking home the income
CONs
Operations: Customer support and operations can take a lot of time
OTHER REVENUE STREAMS WE'VE TRIED
We’ve also each explored alternative revenue streams like:
Speaking at events
Coaching 1:1
Group coaching
Content sponsorships
Ultimately, we want our revenue streams to serve our goals for ourselves. While these were all enjoyable in their own ways, they often required one “input” of effort for one “output” of revenue.
We’re both prioritizing revenue streams that can scale output while maintaining consistent input, like so:
Or, revenue streams that can continue producing revenue if we need to step away or take our foot off the gas for a bit, like so:
Many people call this last one passive income streams. A note on those: Nothing is passive. If you build a revenue stream that lets you step away, while continuing to produce revenue, it’s likely because you’ve put in a lot of upfront work — and you’ll likely do it again.