As designers, we are generally not known for our business acumen. Generally, we’d rather be designing someone else’s project than figuring out how to make more money for ourselves.
Here is a fascinating interview via Mixergy.com with a bootstrapping design entrepreneur who built WooThemes into a $2+ million annual business. WooThemes, is a blog template, or “theme,” developer and is known for clean designs and code as well as extraordinary customer support.
WooThemes’ cofounder, Adriaan “Adii” Pienaar, recalls how his father, in addition to business studies in college, caused him to search for ways of making “passive income” and turning design into a product as opposed to a service.
Passive income refers to earnings that are not attributable to a service one provides in exchange for a fee. Examples include things like:
- Ownership in a business
- Dividends on publicly traded stocks
- Rental income from properties
- Royalties from publishing a book or from licensing a patent
- Earnings from website advertising income
The Internet has been a boon for designers in many respects as—at long last—it has created a way for design professionals to earn passive income streams by building and reselling templates, for example.
In this video, one of the pioneers tells his story. You gotta love this guy’s humility.