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.
Well, I’ve given it some thought and I’ve loeokd over Tumblr again and I suppose you have a point. @ When you explain it like that, Tumblr definitely sounds like Twitter but for blogs. I’m sure WordPress could be turned into something similar as Tumblr but the social features and the ease of publishing different kinds of content and having it all look good I think is the issue here.@ First off, good choice in themes 🙂 Secondly, I can tell there is a difference between your asides posts and your normal posts. Although I’d prefer a little more visual difference between the two, I get what you’re saying.@ Taking a look at it, I see they use the chain link image and some other things to differentiate the short content versus the regular blog post content. I see the same problem though between this site and Chris’s and that is not enough visual difference between the two content forms. This must be what Adii was referring to regarding Tumblr and themes.@ Over the past three months, I’ve seen Posterous popping up more and more in the news. I’m guessing what they have going on over their is a good thing. Have you tried using the built in Press It bookmarklet for quick bursts of information to your WordPress site?@ I think culture may have something to do with it. I mean, there are plenty of people who have a full blown blog and then an entirely separate site for short form content because apparently, the short form and the long form simply don’t mix well together visually. Definitely an interesting conversation and I hope it continues. @ This seems like a comment meant for this post: