Overcoming My Insecurities to Make $600/mo in Truly Passive Income

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?

I'm Michael Taylor, and I'm a technical marketer who has managed $30m+ in marketing budget across channels. My day job is at a growth marketing agency and technology company I co-founded called Ladder. We've actually been interviewed on Indie Hackers before.

I started Excel for Marketers as a way to teach entry-level marketers all of the Excel productivity tips and tricks I've picked up over the years. LinkedIn spotted one of my blog posts and reached out to me (on LinkedIn, of course) because they thought it would make a good online course for LinkedIn Learning (you might know it as Lynda.com, which they acquired and rebranded). After a rigorous selection process, they paid me a $4,000 advance and flew me out to LA to record it with a producer! It took about eight months to pay off the advance, and now it brings in about $600 a month in royalties — truly passive income.

What motivated you to get started with Excel for Marketers?

Like everyone else, I read The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss when it first came out and have been dreaming of passive income ever since. I started my own business, ladder.io, four years ago, but with an 80 hour workweek it's really the opposite of passive income. Despite that workload, I still enjoyed tinkering around with different business ideas in the hopes that one of them would grow into an additional stream of income. Continuing to develop new ideas, especially ones that can provide passive income, helps me feel a little less trapped when the emotional rollercoaster of being a startup founder is at a low point. It refuels my creativity and pulls me out of the myopic psychology of being 100% tied to and invested in my main startup.

In the past, I taught marketing on and off in Startup Institute and General Assembly. While the money was decent, it wasn't particularly scalable as I still had to be there physically at a set time, which is difficult to commit to while maintaining founder hours. Working for AppSumo and taking in what was produced by Noah Kagan (Monthly1k) and Nat Eliason (Programming for Marketers) was where I really saw the power of online courses. Conrad Wadowski and Angkur Nagpal, personal friends and founders at Teachable in New York, sealed the deal with their anecdotes about the million dollar courses people had launched on their platform.

Though I was sold on online courses, it wasn't until much later that I actually got the motivation to put together a full course. As I mentioned, someone from LinkedIn Learning reached out to me as they had noticed one of my blog posts. Perhaps due my British heritage, the need to avoid letting people down at all costs is one of my primary motivators, and this external accountability was exactly what I needed to get started and actually complete the project. It was a lot of late nights and some down-to-the-wire panics, but I managed to get each stage done just before its respective deadline.

What went into building the initial product?

The format of LinkedIn Learning was so smooth and polished, and at each stage I knew exactly what they needed from me. First, I had to produce a course outline (i.e. a table of contents) to pitch them on the topics I would cover. Throughout the processes, they gave a lot of direction and I got the impression they knew exactly what would perform well with their audience: simple, accessible, three minute videos that work as part of the larger course or can be extracted and placed into any other course and still make sense.

After several revisions, the outline was approved and I then had to record a sample video (i.e. a screen capture) of one of the lessons. Unfortunately, the timing worked out such that I was actually on vacation when the sample was due. Cut to me sitting in a dark Vegas hotel room in my pajamas, recording myself teaching how to employ the vlookup formula on a project for a multi-billion dollar tech company, while my wife was downstairs sunning herself and drinking cocktails at the pool. It's one of those surreal founder experiences that I'll always remember. :)

After I got the all clear and learned my project was commissioned, they hooked me up with a producer. I'd never worked with a producer before and found it to an incredibly powerful and productive experience. Weekly calls forced me to keep on track with the course (remember, I don't like to let people down). The sessions were brutally efficient — 15 minutes of production felt like a crossfit workout — and focused entirely on practicing lessons I had already finished. My day job is pretty demanding so it was really tough to keep up with the pace, but I made sure I always had something to show, even if I finished it five minutes before the call.

Finally, before I knew it, I was in California, north of LA in a sleepy seaside town called Carpinteria. It's a beautiful place, very peaceful, amazing weather, and very different from my daily experience in New York and London. That's when it got real. My first day truly sucked. Recording in a booth was very different from practicing via Skype. I had never really heard my own voice before and it threw me off. We had 34 videos, each three to five minutes long, to record over the course of four days. By the end of the first day, I had only finished... two.

The producer was amazing at managing my headspace — we went for a walk in the sun, had a good lunch, and he reassured me that everything was completely fine and normal in order to keep me from freaking out. I was worried they would just give up and send me home, but he convinced me, improbably, that that wouldn't happen on his watch.

The next day we completely turned it around. I got used to the format and really started to fly. I got over 14 lessons done and even had time to re-record the ones from the beginning which I now knew I could do better. By the final day I was finishing lessons in one take without even breaking a sweat. I've never experienced such a massive productivity turnaround in such a compressed space of time, it was a truly amazing experience. Thanks Bobby!

How have you attracted users and grown Excel for Marketers?

One of the major benefits of doing a course like this on someone else's platform is that they do the marketing for you. The vast majority of traffic came from LinkedIn's own marketing, and the course has been seen by over 110,000 people so far! I did, of course, post on social media, linked to it from my original blog post that inspired the course, and sent an email blast to Ladder's blog newsletter subscribers (7,000 people). But the hard work was all done by LinkedIn.

Based on market demand, I knew the course would succeed before even producing it. Excel courses are already LinkedIn's biggest course segment and there are millions of searches for Excel related topics on Google. I also already had a successful blog post to validate that I could attract that kind of traffic. Importantly, the product name is unmistakable. Are you a marketer? Do you need to know Excel? If yes, then of course Excel for Marketers is relevant to you.

This clarity increases both click-through and conversion rate, as well as referrals since it's super easy to tell if a friend or colleague is a marketer that needs to learn Excel.

What's your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

The business model for LinkedIn Learning was inherited from Lynda.com and is pretty unique. They pay an advance payment (usually $2,000 from what I gather, but it's ultimately discretionary and based on course, instructor, and various other factors) when they decide to produce your course. Then once the course is published, you earn royalties, which initially go towards paying down the advanced payment.

Where it gets interesting is how the royalties are calculated. Since LinkedIn Learning is a subscription model where all subscribers can access all videos, they can't just pay you a straight cut of your sales. How they work it out is by taking 10% of all subscription revenue and dividing it by the total visitors on all courses. Then they pay out royalties based on the share of overall visitors your course attracted that month.

It varies, but so far for me that's meant anything from $500 to $700 per month. It took about eight months to pay down the advance payment, so now the royalty money is going straight into my bank account each month.

What are your goals for the future?

I actually tried to pitch a few other course ideas to LinkedIn but haven't gotten any bites yet. The team is extremely selective in what they produce because they already have a ton of amazing authors pitching content (as well as a wealth of content already on the site). I'm not letting that stop me, though. I'm actually working on a new course called "Python for Marketers" that I plan on self-publishing on the Teachable platform. Ironically, since learning how to code in Python I've largely stopped using Excel in my day job, and I want to help the next generation of marketers benefit from the huge productivity boost Python automation can bring.

What are the biggest challenges you've faced and obstacles you've overcome?

The biggest challenge was learning not to be intimidated by my own insecurities. I thought there was no way that I was qualified to teach Excel to a global audience. I know plenty of marketers who are better at Excel than me.

Flying to LA to record in a LinkedIn studio with a producer was crazy. But I kept plowing through, and you know what? None of my fears came true. Nobody called me out as an imposter, and the reviews of my course are really great!

If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

One mistake I wish I could take back was making the course overly complex because I thought that it made me seem smart. As I said, I was intimidated by the prospect and the process and thought that my course wasn't complex enough to be "good". Once I started working with the producer, all I kept hearing was that the course was too complex for the average Excel user.

We eventually worked it down to its core principles and made it much more useful and digestible, but it took time — more time than it should have if I had kept it simple to begin with.

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

I keep going on about this, but working with a producer, or some other type of accountability partner, is life changing. I think not having this sort of accountability is one of the reasons why solo founders struggle. Often we care much more about the opinion of others than we do about our own, and that can be a powerful motivator if you learn how to leverage it.

The other trick I found helpful is to make the practice as similar to the real thing as possible. If I had spent even five minutes in an audio booth before getting to LA, it would have made a world of difference. It was so jarring to record in a booth versus the Skype practice sessions that I was caught unawares and it completely threw my first day, effectively nullifying it. Next time I'd aim to avoid wasting that kind of time and change how I approach practice and preparation.

For busy people who still want to start side businesses despite working long hours — take a vacation, then work on your vacation. I know, it's probably not particularly healthy, but those four days in LA working on something completely different was invigorating. I worked so hard that whole time, but I came back to my business with more energy than when I left. I understand this is more feasible for European founders who get 20-25 days holiday time per year rather than 5-10 in the U.S., but I'd recommend you try it.

What's your advice for indie hackers who are just starting out?

Just get started. I can't believe it took me close to a decade of dreaming about doing this to actually ship it. If I hadn't had the good fortune of connecting with LinkedIn Learning, I'd still be reading IndieHacker interviews all day instead of actually being an IndieHacker myself. It's way easier and less scary than you think, and you don't need to quit your job or even work less hours. Just make yourself accountable and you'll amaze yourself with what you can do.

Where can we go to learn more?

Check out Excel for Marketers — I hope it helps you be more productive as a marketer. Remember: there's almost always a quicker way of doing something in Excel!

I'm @2michaeltaylor on Twitter. You can check out my day job at ladder.io or contact me on LinkedIn.

Please leave a comment below if you have any questions — I'll get to all of them eventually!