Or is it just an urban legend, the stuff of bedtime stories?

It's unlikely that you can build a SaaS company that's completely passive and doesn't require at least a few hours of work each week.

Here are some reasons your SaaS business might not be as passive as you'd like:

1) Marketing channels that are effective at one point may eventually become less so. For example, if you depend on YouTube to promote your product and you unintentionally violate one of their rules, they might suspend your account. Or if their algorithms change and they suddenly care more about the quality of your content than your clickbait titles and thumbnails (humor me here), you could lose viewership and traffic to your site would tank.

To protect against this, you'll want to build multiple forms of marketing so if one becomes less reliable, you can survive on the others until you've optimized or replaced the low-performing one. That means regularly revisiting your marketing techniques to be sure they're producing the ROI you expect.

You also want to revisit your older content to check if it's up-to-date. The more blog articles you have on your site, the more ongoing maintenance it will need to ensure that it still brings in the traffic and results in the conversions it used to.

On the plus side, blog pages are easier to update than videos and other formats (for the moment.. note to self: check back in 5 years to see if YouTube and podcast platforms let you update or replace old content without losing search engine ranking, comments, likes, etc.). If you keep your article at the same web address as you overhaul it, it will maintain and even improve its search engine ranking.

2) Competition. You might be the only solution in a small niche for a while, but if your narrow market appears lucrative, someone's bound to jump in and provide a competing solution. They only need to be 1% better to eat your lunch. To regain your position, you'll have to tweak something, maybe your product, funnel, or offer.

3) Disruption. Let's say you provide a factory management SaaS solution, which helps manufacturers manage orders, inventory, and material requirements. What will happen when we're able to manufacture everything at home? Your ostensibly passive income would turn into a frantic scramble for ways to adapt your solution to APM factories.

All this tweaking and reevaluating adds up; a business you thought would be passive is actually a part-time job, though hopefully an enjoyable one... in which case "job" might not be the word. (Muse? Leisurely distraction? Guilty pleasure? We can all dream.)

But if you're willing to settle for a 10-hour workweek or maybe less, where you just need to do a few weekly administrative or even creative(!) tasks to keep things humming along, a SaaS startup might be the way to go.

The benefit of becoming your own boss is that you can choose your "job". Maybe you actually like posting Instagram updates and TikTok dances, so you hire someone to do the accounting, code new features, and cook your meals (not necessarily different people) so you can get more camera time.

By blurring the lines between business and life, you're no longer working. Just living life like you would have with a traditional 9-5, but this time you're not forced to save the fun for nights and weekends.

Hmm.. maybe it is possible to own a company that requires no "work"? I'll let you know when I get there. 😉

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