How I failed to build a passive income empire

I love reading blogs, tweets, or medium articles about financial freedom. Just from the headlines of those lyrical artworks, you can learn that everyone can build a passive income stream in a short matter of time with little to no effort. These sometimes misleading pieces of bad advice are like an addiction. They motivate me. They’re exciting me, making me feel ready to dive headfirst into the next poorly planned project to continue my list of half-achievements.

And because I’m not the only dreamer who is quickly intoxicated by their messages, you can find them everywhere. I’m not blaming the authors for writing them. I am jealous they found a way to monetize their writing skills. And I believe them when they claim to be somehow successful with their entrepreneurship. But it would be healthy to see more articles about failure. On the other hand, I’m not sure if I would read them.

My approach

I have a nasty list of unfinished projects. I always got the product ready to launch, but I lacked the courage or determination to sell them properly. More on this later. Here are some of the businesses I tried to raise:

Blogs

In my early career of being a self-proclaimed master of passive income streams, I ran a few blogs about miscellaneous topics. I did not think about solving a problem for the readers, and I wasn’t interested in some subjects. My only goal was to make money. The only blog I was interested in never got the chance to shine because I was afraid to show my work, thinking it wasn’t good enough.

Ebooks

The next big thing was ebooks. My waterproof recipe: Sit down and write a compelling non-fiction ebook and sell it on the biggest ebook market there is. You have to work once in advance and are rewarded with passive income for years to come. The problem: my mastermind had the grand idea of cutting the “work in advance” part. And do we need that marketing thing? I guessed not. Guess what: All my ebooks were as compelling as watching a stone age. But the good thing: nobody knew because of my nonexisting marketing strategy.

Day-trading

It sounded enticing: Work 1–2 hours per day, buy and sell some assets and get rich with passive income. Even after studying every resource about trading, I couldn’t make any profit. Luckily I didn’t lose money either because I traded only on virtual accounts most providers offer to get you hooked. I failed at passive income streams, but I have kids. I’m not stupid.

eCommerce

Finally, I got into eCommerce. Setting up a shop was a lot of work, but I learned not to cut this part. I proudly presented my brand new dropshipping shop to gain some new knowledge: the dropshipping eCommerce field is a very saturated market. Had I put some brain into researching a profitable niche in advance, it could have been successful. All motivation poured out of me like rats abandoning a sinking ship, and I stopped riding this dead horse of a shop.

What I’ve learned about passive income

There is no such thing as passive income. If you have a lot of money, you can use assets like stocks or real estate to generate constant income, but you will have to supervise this regularly. But getting rich per passive income is impossible without working a lot in advance.

I tried all the shortcuts from those passive income gurus constantly pitching the “how I made 5 figures per month in 10 days with passive income”. There is no shortcut and no easy way out of the 9to5 job you are hating. To reach financial independence, you have to work, often more hours than in your 9to5 job. But if you stop searching for shortcuts, it is possible.

Why I failed

Here are the main reasons why I failed so many times in reaching my goal of financial freedom through passive income:

Shortcuts

To optimize and streamline every workflow, when there was a possibility to take a shortcut, I took it. Not ready to acknowledge that I was abandoning the quality of my products with this approach.

For example, I had the stunning idea of outsourcing the writing process of an ebook I wanted to sell. So I searched for the cheapest, and I mean the most affordable, ghostwriter I could find and let him write a customized ebook with 10000 words for just under 100 bucks. At that time, I was so sure that this was a money-making machine. Guess what? Nobody bought the book, and years later, I re-read it and was astonished by the poor quality of the masterpiece.

Afraid to get out there

I guess this was and sometimes still is my main problem. When I think about getting out there, building a personal brand to make people believe in me and my products, I feel nauseous. From my youth until today, I have always hated to be the center of attention.

It is the same pattern with every project: I’m wading through highs and lows in motivation from start to end. But when I reach the finish line, self-doubt takes over like a paralyzing wave. Often I then just hurried the launch, not telling anyone about it and abandoning marketing. So when the project fails, I could blame myself for bad marketing. The project didn’t die, but the marketing. It is twisted logic, I know, but back then, it worked for me.

Sucking big at marketing

I was (and still am sometimes) sure that as soon as I had my product ready to launch, every person on this planet would instantly know about it and would be prepared to buy as much as their wallets would give. Wasting time to plan out a strategy to gain customers’ attention was not on my schedule.

Well, I guess it was an overcompensating effect that originated in my self-doubt problem, as mentioned earlier. But even when I tried to do it right, I wasn’t educated enough in this area and quickly rode my marketing horse to death. Today, I know that the most effective way is to work on a detailed marketing plan to get things rolling. But in the past, I just blindly stumbled through the highly-competitive warzone of getting customers’ attention.

Verdict

So to end this article with a positive note, here is what I’ve learned from failing:

• Repeat with me: success needs time, work, and dedication.
• Don’t use shortcuts, and when you use them, keep track of quality.
• Don’t be afraid to show your work. Nobody will judge you for trying to build a sustainable business you and your family could live of
• LEARN F*CKING MARKETING until you hate it, then use and abuse it
• Don’t be afraid of failing, but learn from every wrong step you took

The breakpoint for me came when I overcame my self-doubt and started to learn marketing properly. Still, I’m not too fond of it, but it is a necessary tool.

During this period of failure, I worked full-time as a freelancer. I still fail regularly with my personal projects, but my success ratio is finally on the positive side.