Hey! This is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps!
I'm back in England from the nice long holiday and today, I want to talk a
little bit about active income versus passive income.
Okay, so I got back to England yesterday afternoon. I'm still dealing with a lot of jet lag.
I went to bed at 11:00 last night, got up at 2:00 a.m. like just three hours later
wide awake, was up until 6:00 gone back to bed until noon and it was just-
I'm dealing with a lot of jet lag issues, but it's actually kind of
nice to be back. Most of the time, when I go from San Diego
back to Wantage, I feel a little bit, you know, I feel homesick.
I feel like, you know, you're missing everybody already and I do. I do
miss everybody, all my family and stuff, my family back there
coming back here. But it's also really exciting as I get to work on some
Overpass stuff, I have the car waiting, all this kind of stuff. We got the
more videos get back on a consistent schedule and dealing with a
lot of the stuff that's kind of crept up. So, one of the big things, I hope
you guys could hear me okay with the wind, one of the big things that became really
clear over the last couple weeks being in San Diego was that the problems with
the time difference. The nice thing-- so basically, whenever I
talk about the Overpass as a business, I talk about active income versus our
passive income. Our active income is client work. It's whatever we do
on a day to day basis. Well, I guess this is client work really and our passive
income is the app income, so that could be from the ad networks from the
app revenue, all that kind of stuff. And our passive income, it's really low
at the moment, but it's still okay. It's like- I know I'll go through
this- I'll give you- I'll show you exactly what it is sometime within the next few
episodes because you know I don't really mind. But it's like between a hundred-
right now, it's between 120 and 150 pounds a day, is what we're
making through the apps and stuff like that. A year ago, it was much higher.
At this time last year was much higher, but AdMob is really, really low. The
RPMs at the moment, I'm still trying to hold out because the impressions are
still the same but my RPMs really low. I'm kind of hoping that comes back and
I'm really- one of the things I might do over the next few weeks is
change ad networks because it's concerning, right? So we make between
130-150 a day now, more on- lot more on about 140.
But you know, am I spending less than that while I'm on holiday? Hell
no. I'm spending more than that especially on holiday. This is one of
those things rose in San Diego for two weeks. My apps keep making me
money. The passive income keeps coming in, but we also have client work.
So you know, with the client work, it was a lot more difficult
because we had the time zone difference. Like say, one of my clients, say we
were supposed to release something with them just before I left, but things went a bit a
bit late, but we have a team in India who's working on it. So they're handling
a lot of the stuff. But there's a lot of queries and stuff that come up that
I have to deal with. So, what was happening was, I go to bed
like it 11, 10 or 11 or whatever, and I would have an email almost like-
almost exactly when I went to sleep. If I just waited around a little bit, but
you never know, so be like 12:20 in the morning, there'd be an email
and then like no response and I would get up like at 8, which would be
4 p.m. UK time. I would respond to that email and so the Indian
team will email me about something, I'll have to go back to the client with
something, I'll go to the client, the client gives a response, I'll go back to
the team, but of course, they have to respond the next day. So things that
should have taken hours we're taking days. This is all part of the
active income. Plus, I'd get up in the morning and everybody's "hey, good
morning!", all this kind of stuff, at my mom's kitchen table,
and I'm just sitting or typing away and "I'm sorry, I just have to
deal with this stuff ," which I hate. I hate being that guy. So yeah, if you have
to choose between active income and passive income, I will always go with
passive income. We're talking about apps, you know, apps that we
released years ago are still making us money. We got active income
or which is, you know, if you're not around to handle it, then things go
really wrong. So you know- but everyone realized when I was on
holiday- so they were trying to keep everything to a minimum,
keep their expectations low. So, one of the things we
always talk about is why- one of the things I think about a lot is
why don't we just focus completely on passive income, right?
I mean, if you read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" a lot of you, guys, probably have
read it several times over the last 15- 10, 15-20 years, I can't remember
when I first read it. He talks about the story of a
village that needs water. They hired two competing companies, one of
them buys a bunch of buckets, goes down to the water, brings it back every day,
immediately starts making money. Another one goes away and starts
building a system, so they're building pipes, are getting investors, are
investing a lot of money early and they're building that system in place.
And I think about this analogy law, so the guy
who's carrying the buckets, he's making money initially. He's going, what's this
idiot doing over there, he's working with pipes and setting up piping and
all this kind of stuff. Eventually, the piping goes live, the
system goes live and they're able to sell water at a much cheaper rate and
and he has to hire more people with more buckets. Pretty soon he
can't keep up. And this is something I think about a lot. With
our active income, with the client work, that's bucket carrying. That's
immediate pay so we get an immediate money and
guaranteed money. So you know, if we take on a client work, we expect to be paid.
If we create a new app, we hope to be paid, we hope that's gonna
work out. It also requires a lot of investment first.
I've read a lot of books about passive income. How it's easy just to
write an e-book or buy stuff on Amazon and sell it on Amazon or doing apps, all
this kind of stuff. It's always- it always makes it sound so easy, like all
you have to do is create this app, put it on the app market and then the money
just flows in. We all know that that's just bullshit.
That never happens that way. What happens is, it's like pushing a
boulder. You put everything in place and once you release that app,
nothing happens. And you have to push it, you have to invest and you have to start
getting some momentum. I haven't- yeah, it's been months since I've spent
anything on advertising for the apps, they just- and
they still continue to generate revenue, but in the beginning, I spend a lot of
time doing them ,pushing that boulder, trying to get some momentum.
I think that's the same with all passive income. I love- you know, so
this is one of the reasons why I don't, you know, every so often, if I have
an argument with a client or something I said, that's it, we're just doing passive.
We're just gonna do our own apps, are gonna forget all this kind of stuff, but
we still have bills to pay and there's still a lot of money to be made there.
So, I don't mind making an app for a client who they're hoping to have a
bit of passive income, but they have to handle all of that building the
momentum, all that investment and we just get paid for the work that we do.
And I'm completely fine with that. It's much easier when we're having the
same time zone. You know, but
the ideal always should be, is to build up enough passive income so you have
situations like that, so even if you can't find any clients, you still have
money coming in. Even if you have, you know, but yeah- I guess, the point I'm
trying to make is, a lot of people tell me why don't you just
give up client work? Just focus on your own apps. And the problem- and the
reason is, I'm never 100% certain with that and we still have bills to pay and
we saw have stuff to do. There's still a lot of money to be made, there's
a lot of people who need apps done. There's a lot of companies that need
apps, then you started to see more companies coming on board who need, not
apps for, we're gonna make it rich on the app market kind of thing, but
like we have something for some internal processes that we need, we have like our
employees need this app to help them do something or other
all this kind of stuff. We're starting to see- again, I keep saying
the same thing, if you watch all the time we're going the same way that
the web went, where the web was in initial in the dot-com stages
in the early days it was like, I'm gonna launch this website and become rich and
then it became, I'm gonna create this tool for this organization and I'm gonna
get paid on a license basis. Anyway, I'm rambling on, I know, but
it's nice to be back. Despite that you can see it's all cloudy and
overcast, but it's not so hot as it was. I miss San Diego and I
can't wait to go back next year. That's my goal, this is the goal. I'm gonna tell
you before I actually reach it, is to go back to San Diego again next year. Anyway,
that's it for today, Saturday. 'll talk to you, guys, tomorrow.
Oh no, I'll talk to you, guys, on Monday.