I created a simple $5,000/month income stream. On autopilot.
Hey Indie Hackers,
I managed to build a $5,000/month income stream that is now running passively, completely on autopilot.
I wanted to share this success story with you, as well as share some insights that you can use to replicate it with.
ℹ️ See the full breakdown of this setup on YouTube.
The setup
- I sell e-books
- I run ads on Facebook and YouTube
It sounds simple. But there's a few gotchas to make this work.
The problem with info products
If you've ever tried selling a digital product online, I'm sure you're familiar with this pattern.
Week 1... Full of sales
Week 2... Way fewer sales
Week 3... crickets
That's not what we want.
We want a consistent flow of sales, without having to constantly pump our social channels full of plugs.
Solution: Run ads
Yes. And it works really well!
The "suite" we want consists of:
- A product in the lower end of the price range ($10-$30)
Selling expensive courses at +$200 is significantly more difficult, and requires a lot more experience and a more advanced campaign setup. - A landing page that is optimized for selling through ads (So don't use Gumroad or other platforms like that. You need a custom landing page).
- Conversion campaigns on Facebook and YouTube (this includes installing their pixels/trackers on your landing page).
- Nice, eye-popping visuals that make people stop scrolling.
I have been using this simple setup for almost 6 months now, and I make a $5,000 profit (on average), and have been peaking at around $10,000 in good months.
The profit margin is around 80%.
It works!
How to get started
First, you need a product.
But you don't need to overthink this. Create a short and concise e-book where you share some of the knowledge you are an expert in.
You need to create a landing page
Use Webflow, Wix, or Shopfy (if you're not a programmer).
Again - no need to overthink it.
You need to craft some great ads
I prefer using Figma. But Cavna is a great choice as well.
Set up a conversion campaign.
If you've never done this before, there's a slight learning curve on both Facebook and YouTube. But it's honestly not that bad.
Check out my latest YouTube video.
I go into much more details on how to craft a great ad, what your landing page must consist of, and how to make sure it converts.
🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wq5itfNNnE
I hope you got something out of this little read 🙌
Happy hacking!
After 19,314 lines of code, i'm shutting down my project
Need feedback for my product.
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Thanks Simon for the post.
I have to say that you missed an important detail on why your Ads work. and it's you. Your Ads are run by You. people click on your profile to check how much authority and credentials you got (no one buys from a nobody) and they discover that you have over 80k folowers on twitter. So not anyone can go and replicate what you did.
You are right 😊
Now, I'm not running ads on Twitter, but I do have around 17K followers on Instagram, and it definitely has an impact, yes.
I don't leave this detail out - if you watch the video, you'll see it's one of the 3 core elements I describe, which makes this selling system work.
Do you think someone who is just starting out with no social proof would be able to adapt this system?
This is really cool! I always thought that running ads was just a way to suck all of our money! XD I have a podcast that helps small entrepreneurs to build profitable businesses. It is called Wannabe Entrepreneur. I would love to interview you about your entrepreneurial journey. Would you be up for it?
Sure 😊 Hit me up on Twitter.
cool. I have sent you a DM
Great content Simon! both here and on your channel
Thank you, brother 💪
Appreciate it!
@SimonHoiberg Hands-down one of the best post on Indie Hackers.
Thank you for sharing.
Uhh, I don't know about that!
But I really appreciate your kind words 🧡
Thank you!
I appreciate your post because it's to-the-point, simple, actionable, and specific, unlike a lot of the other "tutorials" that are vague and handwavy.
Thank You So Much For Sharing this Simon 🙏
Wanted to know a few things.
You are super welcome! 😁
My pleasure.
Grateful for your valuable response, Simon. Thank You.
Facebook ads work, and they work well. Once you get them working for a few purchases, the next few hundred are easy work.
However, the main issue with ads is they continue to get more expensive. The cost per acquisition of getting a customer steadily increases.
A few reasons why your thing worked:
Firstly, it converts easily on mobile or desktop. Users can convert on your landing page, a few seconds after visiting by clicking "buy now". The product is cheap, and its clear what they'll receive.
Learning coding ebooks are an easy sell - almost everyone knows coding is a valuable skill to have, and people buy the books in the hopes that they'll eventually read them - there's a term for this behaviour, where people buy courses or books in the hopes that just the act of buying or investing in education will be enough for them eventually read.
I'm wondering what countries you targeted with your ads. Nowadays targeting USA, Canada, UK or other countries is pretty expensive, so I'm surprised you were able to get a sale for around $5.80 per pop - impressive.
Awesome breakdown! I 100% agree with your analysis here.
As I also account for in the video, I believe the social presence does have a lot to say as well.
Most purchases come from Instagram where I'm active and have almost 17K followers - that social proof matters, and I believe it's contributing to the low CAC.
I target a large range of countries, but most sales do indeed come from US, UK, and Europe (though, I get quite a few sales from India as well).
And thanks! Yes - around $6-$10 per purchase, it varies a bit from day to day and month to month.
I'd like to put more emphasis on the online presence and business network.
If it's as easy to convert $1K into $5K through facebook ads, yahoo boys would drop scamming.
Well, yes - it's not something that's guaranteed to work, neither is it something you can spin up without putting any initial work into it at all.
Of course.
But it is actually significantly easier than you'd think.
At least, I was surprised.
And I wonder why many e-book creators don't do this (primarily) instead of wearing themselves down by constantly having to do new viral content in order to get more exposure.
I can speculate a few reasons why they don't do this;
With a second thought. After a few searches on "Passive Income", I usually get bombarded with many courses/books. So yeah I shall think it further and try to spare some budget.
This is inspiring, thanks Simon!
Sorry if I missed this, but how do you actually publish and deliver your e-book? e.g. is it just a PDF that you send unprotected to people who buy it? or is it properly published on Amazon? either way, what software did you use to put it together?
It's a great question 😊
I set up my own system for delivering - but it is really as simple as sending an email with a download link, which refers back to my website which will fetch a prepared PDF given an ID (quick check to see if the person actually paid).
But if you wanted to, you could probably easily find ways to abuse it.
And to make matters worse - search for my e-book on Google, and the second and third hit that shows are pirate sites where the book is available for free as a PDF.
This is another reason why it's important to create a low-cost product.
You're not missing out terribly if people are gonna steal it for free...
(Though, I do report these pages and have it taken down whenever I can).
Thanks, Simon, that's good to know.
That sounds like a good policy: basic measures against piracy, but in the end, honest people are going to pay you (especially, as you say, if the price is low), and there's only so much you can do about dishonest people.
Exactly!
@SimonHoiberg Thanks for the post. I have few online courses. Do you think this strategy would work for them as well? Or do you think ebook allows for higher conversion rate?
Thank you 😊 Glad you got something out of it.
Yes, I think it will work perfectly with online courses as well.
Prediction: Simon’s YT channel passes 50k subs this year. It’s at under 10k now.
I really hope so 🤩
Thanks for sharing!
Simon great video editing and lighting wow! Im just curious about 2 things:
How long typically on FB before you see success? Im sure you have to test a lot but from beginner to where you are now what kind of $ did you spend to get here?
Also love the audio quality what mic are you using lol?
Thanks a lot 😁
Well, I wasted quite a bit of money before getting the hang of it 😅
You don't have to though - there's so many great resources available, and as I got more patient and started learning, I realized I could have saved quite a bit if I had just properly researched instead of rushing it.
I use a Røde shotgun microphone 😊
Thanks for sharing! Great video too.
I have one question:
Have you tried Google ads?
I'm testing it for one of my projects and will use it on another one. I've studied Facebook ads and to me it does better fit Google ads. Of course ads with images is more for Facebook but would like to know your thoughts about it.
Appreciate
Thank you 😊
And that's a great question!
Technically speaking, YouTube ads are Google ads. They are created in Google's Ad Console, and YouTube is just the placement of a video ad.
But to answer your question from how I interpret it:
No, I haven't tried placing my ads in Google search or on third-party websites using AdSense - but I've been very curious about it.
I don't have a particular reason why, though - I know a lot of people who had great results from these kinds of ads. Personally, I just never got to that yet 😁
Yes, agree YouTube ads are Google ads. Didn't explain it well but luckily you got the point. Thanks for your answer.
Hi, Simon! Interesting post, thank you for sharing.
Do you advertise just this one ebook or do you have multiple of them?
Additionally, have you provided proof of sales numbers anywhere? Not doubting you, but it's easy to exaggerate numbers in these kinds of posts.
Thanks 😊 Glad it was helpful.
I currently sell two e-books.
In this way, I can alternate between the offers - so when I've run a campaign for one for a while, I swap to the other.
I'm planning on adding more e-books in the future as well.
No, I haven't provided any proof of sales figures, nor do I think that should be necessary. This is free advice, and it's pretty much take it or leave it 😉
I'll always respect a good hustle - kudos for making it happen.
However, exaggerating numbers is... just a strange behavior, in my humble opinion.
If you're leading with "I make $5k with these simple steps", I believe, you should actually prove that you're making this amount of money from selling ebooks. Just a simple screenshot from your FB Ads manager would seem easy enough to do and would add a lot more trust to your message.
P.S. I'm certainly not trying to appear as a hater, don't get me wrong.
I agree. And I'm not exaggerating anything here.
Contrary, I think reading a post and assuming that the author is exaggerating until proven otherwise is a sad reader perspective to enter with.
But that's entirely up to you, of course 😊
You don't have to follow my advice.
(Also, no hate from here at all).
What makes you believe a screenshot more than someone's word? With a few seconds in the web inspector that value could just be changed to whatever value and it won't prove anything.
He's not sharing something that is not known before, that you can make money from conversion ads isn't some new science so not sure why you'd need additional proof for that. He's just explaining it in a great and straight forward way.
The screenshot was just an idea, nothing else. True, they can be edited, too. I'm just generally suspect of claims of making heaps in easy income but not providing any proof of said claim. I don't think it is as unreasonable of an expectation as you and OP put it.
Thanks for sharing this @SimonHoiberg! I was wondering if you use any specific method/approach when researching what topics to write about? Or is it more a gut feeling approach?
You're very welcome 🙌
Yes, I actually follow 3 rules:
There should be an audience.
Don't worry, there almost always is.
The book should write itself.
Pick a topic that you know so well that you can write it in your sleep.
You should be able to provide value in 80 pages or less.
Selling lightweight resources at a lower cost typically works better than something heavy and comprehensive (for this system, at least).
That sounds like a good approach. It has definitely been on my mind for some time to try and put some paid content out there. Appreciate the breakdown!
Congrats Simon! That’s a great profit margin.
Some questions to better understanding:
Which countries are you targeting?
Which CPC’s are you paying?
Which is the landing conversion rate?
Will watch your video :)
Congrats! Did you write the book too?
I did, yes 😊
It sounds cool that you have found a nice recipe for promoting your digital product!
How often do you update the content of your e-book? Also, are you planning to extend your offerings (i.e. Book A, Book B, etc.)?
Thanks!
I currently sell 2 e-books, both on the topics of software development.
I still haven't had a reason to update them yet - but it would be easy to do, if the case arises.
And yes - I'm definitely planning to create more info products 😊
Both e-books and video courses.
That's awesome! Were you working on feedhive.io before the digital products, Simon?
I was, yeah 😊
And FeedHive is still the main thing I'm working on.
These e-books is a great supplement though.
Great content!
Thank you 🙏
Thanks for the write up! The video is amazing too!
I recently released an eBook, the Phoenix Deployment Handbook on Deploying Elixir and Phoenix applications. I'm going to see if I can make paid ads work for me.
Awesome 🙌
I'd love to hear about it if you make it work out 😊
Are you making 5k just from ads? Or total?
Just from running ads.
I do sell my e-books through other sources, but that's not included here 😊
Thanks for the tips and guidance. I will definitely utilize this for future endeavors.
Glad you got something out of it 😊
Very nice 👍 thank you for sharing.
Thanks Simon!
I'm launching a new info product every month this year and have been wondering how to stop the sales cliff.
Did you find that the ads had any effect on tarnishing your personal/agency brand? Or did it help them instead?
With info products, I'm personally wary of purchasing them via ads, unlike software products.
It's funny you mention this because it was one of my main concerns.
But no, I can safely say that my personal brand did not suffer in any way thus far.
In fact, Facebook makes it super easy to "invite people to like" your page and on YouTube, I track some of my new subscribers back to my ads.
So if anything, it actually has some small and nice side effects as well 😊
Good to know! I will definitely be investing in ads then.
Thank you Simon! Excited to get that revenue stream rolling. :)
This was an awesome writeup. Thanks so much for sharing!
Glad you got something out of it 😊
Great to hear! How much do you spend on ads? Could you break down your ad spend please.
On average, I spend around $50/day 😊
Thanks for sharing Simon, surely it's inspirational. I too wanted to try ads, but was thinking more of Twitter ads. Why do you think Facebook and YouTube work better?
Thank you 😊 I'm happy it's inspirational.
Well, in my experience, Twitter's ad platform is just extremely primitive compared to Facebook's and Google's (YouTube).
Generally, I only use Twitter's ad platform to A/B test ideas.
Because the verification process is so loose, you can spin up a campaign and quickly test out a few ideas in a snap. It's useful for that - but that's also about it.
What other topics for e-books have you tried this with? Seems like JavaScript is one of those ones that seems to have a wide/large market.
I'm currently selling two e-books: one about JavaScript and one about Open-Source.
But I'm also using Facebook and YouTube ads for my SaaS product, and have been using the same system to sell items through dropshipping.
I believe the idea of a niche being too small is a bias.
On the internet, no niches are too small, really 😁 There's always gonna be plenty enough for you to make money from, even in super small niches.
@SimonHoiberg do you have an example of your YouTube Ad for SaaS? I'm currently analyzing some and sharing with others, would love to include yours.
very cool. I have a couple ebooks I give away for free that people tell me I should sell. what is your customer acquisition cost? how long did it take to figure out your ad strategy so this was possible?
The profit margin is around 60-80%.
So roughly speaking, it cost me $100 to generate $400-500 in sales.
It took a bit of playing around.
I tried a lot of different variants of ads, tested out different placements, etc.
YouTube is particularly tricky. You literally have 5 seconds to deliver and make people curious enough to not skip 😁
It can be a bit hard to nail down.
But experiment. That's the best advice I can give.
Allow an initial budget just to play around.
Great writeup and top tier youtube presentation. Nice work.
I hear stories like this and wonder if we have some survivorship bias going on, whereby only sellers with valuable social media brands can achieve these results.
I wonder, is there a way to statistically index or quantify the value of your online presence?
It would be great to get some sort of model together, whereby the real-world value of each "step" can be measured and forecast.
-The product itself
-the landing page
-the ad quality / copy
-social proof
Thanks for posting.
Thank you for this comment! Really appreciate your nice words 🧡
And yes - I would love such a model as well.
Unfortunately, I think this is a case (among many others), where something that works for someone doesn't work for the next person but works well for the next person again, etc.
I don't believe there's a way (with respect for data and statistics) to reasonably quantify each step - at least not to an extent where the data would be meaningful.
What I think we can do is look at certain patterns and trends, and compare them with similar cases where one or more of the steps above are excluded.
It's my impression that a solid social presence helps - but it isn't mandatory to make this system work.
How big of an impact it has... It's really hard to say.
I have a youtube video idea for you haha...
A/B test your javascript ebook. Same ebook, same copy. Option A is posted by your current brand Facebook / IG account, links to youtube, etc. Option B is an ad by a new account-- perhaps a clone of your main one, with no followers or engagement. Preferably no personal branding at all.
I predict you'd see very lopsided results, but the extent to which is perhaps that number we're talking about. The extent to which people are investing in YOU vs your product.
In the real world though, each "step" you outline has many iterations and improves over time, so these may not be practical results, but they'd be interesting!
I love the idea 🤩
Haha - whether the results will be of "scientific" significance is probably questionable.
But it would definitely be interesting and entertaining content!
I might actually do that 😁
Congrats with your book Simon! How long it took you to write it?
Around 40 hours in total 😊
That included some research, preparing a bit of marketing copy + creating graphics for the book.
Just 40h??? How many pages is that?
71 pages 😊 Though, with a lot of visuals and graphics that take up space as well.
And yes - as I mentioned in another comment, a key rule I always recommend to follow when creating an e-book, is to pick a topic that you are an expert in, or scope the topic to an area that you know in and out.
You should be able to write the e-book in your sleep.
Don't tab into something where you need to do a tremendous amount of research - if it flops, it's very bitter time wasted.
There are a lot of great occasions to learn something new.
This is not one of them 😉
It's exactly what I did here as well.
I kept the scope of the e-book to a topic I know a whole lot about, and I deliberately made an "opinionated guide" rather than a book explaining fundamentals.
Keeping your book oriented around your subjective experience with something will require much less fact-checking and further research.
I usually set a quite high bar for myself. So picking the right audience and level you are aiming for might be a very important detail here. I guess that's where your focus on "opinionated" helps.
It sounds easy.....
Nothing is easy.
But it's not as hard as you might think...
(At least, I was positively surprised!)
Fair enough,...
I see you're using gumroad as a payment provider.
Did you have any problems with facebook pixel properly counting your purchases?
If yes, what did you do to fix it?
If not, could you explain how did you arrange it?
I have a hard time making it work
I'm not using Gumroad as a payment provider.
I would not recommend using them. Many people have had issues with them.
I use Stripe. Which I would highly recommend using on the other hand.
If you cannot use Stripe from where you're doing business, I suggest using Paddle instead.
So to answer your question:
Got some more info on those problems? Would love to learn the details.
Thanks for sharing a different perspective on indiehacking ;
e-books.
You're very welcome.
Worth noting: I run a SaaS as my main activity.
But I think this is a great side-income and a way of financing/covering some extra expenses, especially while bootstrapping!
Looks interesting, thanks for sharing Simon. So just to make sure I've understood this right
Yes, that is correctly understood.
Conversions are measured as a "purchase". So it's not a lead magnet for email subscriptions/signups or anything like that. Direct sales only.
(Although the latter can definitely work as well, but it's more advanced).
On average, I have around 60-80% profit margin, so in order to make $5,000, you'll need to spend roughly $1,500-2000 on running ads.
When running conversion campaigns, Facebook needs a bit of time to train.
It's important to get sufficiently with conversions (purchases) in the first 7 days (using a 7-day attribution window), and in order to amplify exposure, I suggest running a daily ad budget on at least 5x the price of your product.
So in my case, selling an e-book for $19, that would be a $100 daily ad budget.
After that, I lower it to around $50/day.
If you want more of these details, check out the video I linked to in the post above 😁 I break a lot of this down in further details in there.
Thanks for the follow up Simon, sounds great. I'll check out the video 👍
I'm interested to learn more about, the landing page: why custom is better than the landing platforms?
In my experience:
It's often difficult to set up the pixels/trackers correctly. Sometimes you want to be able to customize the way you trigger events, which is often made near impossible.
It's harder to customize. You want the ads and the website to look and feel the same - which is hard with a "generic" (and ugly) platform design like Gumroad, etc.
You can't change the placements of important elements. Video presentation, reviews, testimonials, etc. This is often crucial in order to optimize conversions.
You can't experiment and do A/B testing. Not that this is necessary by any means, but it's definitely a nice to have.
You can't do proper analytics. With your own landing page, you can use any analytics platform you which and not being limited to the ones that ships with the landing platform.
Ver useful knowledge, thank you for sharing 🤓.
nice , i love your youtube btw really high quality
Hi Simon. Do you mind sharing what's your ROAS like?
Running ads is relatively easy (for people like us who make a living out of that), the issue is making sure that the numbers add up.
Great video! How much did you spend on experiments before getting your first sale?
Any recommendations of content/courses to improve my copywriting skills?
A very interesting post! Just a quick question, are the majority of your costs attributed to marketing?
Hi Simon, great article. Which platforms do you use for advertising? Only Facebook and YouTube?
Simon, these are amazing results!
Could you share more numbers for each of the advertising channels?
What is the Average Cost-per-View and Average Cost-per-Click for Youtube?
I have tried unsuccessfully to advertise WordPress plugins for several years, and for almost 1,000,000 impressions on Youtube, I got only 72 clicks, screenshot here https://i.imgur.com/nePNQnP.png
The cost-per-click was about $15, and with the price of the plugin $69, it is absolutely not profitable.
I've also tried Facebook a few times, and for targeting on the USA I can't get less than $2 per click, and that didn't get me results either.
This is super cool, thanks for sharing Simon. I like the level of abstraction at which you explain this business.
I tend to think that the "ebook for programmers" business is saturated, but this is giving me some ideas 🤔
As someone who knows that niche well, do you think that's true? What does it take to stand out, in terms of the main idea of the ebook? I'd imagine people are looking more for industry/professional insights, as opposed to generic "how-to" guides which are readily available for free.
Curious to hear your thoughts on this! I'll check out your YouTube channel as well :)
Simon, thanks for sharing this. How did you manage to ship those and have those books library or run an offline store to get the item from?
Did you have staff? I'll be glad to learn more about this. Thanks
I recently started thinking of making an e-book. This definitely helps, will check out the video, thanks!
what books you are selling couldn't find any link to them
Very interested to hear.. Keep up the good work
thanks for sharing! i always thought about creating my own digital product like an ebook and this gave me the extra boost to try it out!
I was wondering, how do you deliver your ebook once someone makes the purchase? i wasn't aware that Shopify had an option for the customer to be able to download after purchase. which platform do you use? thanks!
Great thank you for sharing!
Interesting case, thanks for sharing Simon!
I’ve a few questions:
Thanks again for sharing all this.
Do you target a completely cold audience or people who already know you and are warm? Can someone with 0 audience have success with this method?
Couldn't love this more. Well written. I might try this. Who doesn't want $5K MRR for nothing (eventually)?
Nice post Simon. I also have 2 eBooks I plan to do FB Ads on. Will see how it goes when I start doing this.
Your post really inspired me :)
The video, and your eBook video, have really got me fired up.
I'm releasing an iOS app in the summer and want to try FB ads for driving sales. Do you think it would be a good idea to point clicks to a landing page with a FB pixel or send them directly to the AppStore?
I imagine that sending customers directly to the AppStore would result in a higher conversion rate but can FB's ad algorithm optimise the ad when it's not pointing to a page with a FB pixel? What would you do? Link to a landing page or to the AppStore?
Thanks for sharing! Did you run Facebook ads for both your ebooks and for how long for each before you started seeing real results?
Ouaaa, so cool Simon thank you for all those information. I've seen you are from Zurich ;-) I live in Lausanne but wanted to let you know that I love the quality of your videos. Do you do it on your own?
Thanks for sharing. checking out your video now!
Great post! Thanks for sharing it @SimonHoiberg
Thanks for sharing this info. Insightful!
What would you suggest is a good starting point to learn Youtube advertising? Do you have any resources on top of your head you can suggest?