I co-run http://vsual.co . We make five figures of monthly revenue, and generally my partner and I work 8:30-10 AM before our "regular" jobs. We're growing at a moderate pace—for now this is passive(ish) income, but one day we may dive all in.
That's awesome! I saw on your original submission on showhn for vsual that you were trying to figure out the marketing. How have you done since then and what worked for you? Five figures is quite impressive
The short answer is no, we don't have it 100% figured out yet. But we have learned a few things:
- The cost per sale of paid marketing targeting CUSTOMERS is just a little too high to be sustainable right now. Part of that, I think, is because the searching/tagging/categorization of VSUAL isn't great. We can create an ad with interesting art that causes a clickthrough, but if that piece isn't quite compelling enough to sell, we don't do a good job showing similar pieces. We're working on improved tagging and categorization right now to make finding curated, related artworks easier.
- Many of our best selling artists do quite well attracting their own traffic to their store. They already have IG/FB followings significantly greater than our own. So, we're investing in tools to help those artists with marketing (such as markup generators) and to help tools specifically for artists with distribution. For example, those artists who already have distribution want to link people to their shop, not to an entire platform. We're working on building whitelabeled shop pages without the platform nav bar for those partners in particular.
- Finally, I believe that with the amount of UGC on the site, we're currently not taking full advantage of the power of SEO. Creating landing pages specific to art styles and techniques is high on my to-do list after our upcoming tagging improvements are launched. I'm hopeful that moderate SEO improvements can drive our traffic up significantly.
If I had a side project that was bringing in five figure monthly revenue it would become my regular job pretty quickly. Are you hesitating because you don't think the revenue is going to last?
No, the revenue seems like it will last. But revenue is not profit, and I have a family to take care of and I'm the breadwinner. Plus, my regular job is good. Leaving my regular job for VSUAL right now would mean a 20x reduction in income, and I can't support myself on that. In time, hopefully that divisor gets smaller.
