Side Project Empire, Part 3: Turning Side Projects Into Income
Originally published on Medium. Read here free — no account needed.
You picked projects that compound. You automated the busywork. Now here’s how the whole thing starts paying you back.
There’s a fantasy the internet sells developers, and I bet it sounds all to familiar. Quit your job, launch a startup, get rich while you sleep.
I’m not going to sell you that, because I’m not living it, and neither is almost anyone posting screenshots of their MRR dashboard.
Here’s what I am living. I still have a full-time job. I still have 15 side projects. And somewhere in the last few months, a couple of those projects quietly started making money, without me launching a company, raising a round, or working a single extra weekend to make it happen.
The income came from a loop I ran on top of the projects I already had, no new project required. 🛠️
This is Part 3, the last part of the series. Part 1 was about picking projects that compound. Part 2 was about the automation stack that lets one person run all of them. This part is about the payoff, and how you turn a portfolio of side projects into a trickle of income that grows as you keep shipping.
Income Is a Side Effect, Not a Goal
Let me be honest about the scale first, because the brand runs on honesty.
I have two products live right now. One is priced at $3. The other is $12. I’m early, and I’m not going to pretend a screenshot of life-changing revenue exists when it doesn’t.
So why write this at all? Because the loop works. I’ve run it twice, back to back, and both times it produced a real product with real buyers off the back of an article I was going to write anyway. Once you’ve proven a loop runs, running it fifty more times is a scheduling problem, not a mystery.
That’s the reframe for this whole piece. You’re not chasing a payday. You’re installing a repeatable motion that turns work you already do into products that sell while you’re doing something else. Income becomes a side effect of consistent shipping.
Back in Part 1, trait number seven was content generation, the idea that the right projects spin off blog posts, demos, and artifacts as a byproduct. In Part 2, I called the automation stack an asset factory. This part is where you sell what the factory makes.
The Loop: 5 Stages
Here’s the whole system in one line: byproduct → free article → packaged product → cross-link → repeat.
Five stages. None of them require you to become a marketer or a founder. Let me walk each one, with the two real products I ran through it.
1. Start With the Byproduct, Not a Product Idea
What it is: You don’t brainstorm a product. You look at what your projects already produced and ask which piece a stranger would pay for.
Most people do this backwards. They dream up a product, then try to build an audience for it from zero. You already skipped that step by building in public across a compounding portfolio.
My first product, the SDD Template, was a specification-driven-development template I’d built for my own projects months earlier. It already existed. I used it every time I started a feature. Packaging it took an afternoon, not a sprint.
Why it works: A byproduct has already survived contact with reality. You use it, so you know it’s good, and you’ve already found its rough edges. That’s trait number one from Part 1, personal pain, showing up again on the money side. If you dogfood it, you can sell it.
2. Teach It for Free
What it is: Write the article that gives away the thinking behind the byproduct. The whole thing. No paywall, no “get the rest for $9.”
This feels backwards too. If I’m giving it away, who buys? The answer is that the free article is what earns the trust that makes the sale possible, and it does the reaching that a product page never could.
When I listed the SDD Template, I paired it with an article on why test-driven development so often has people building the wrong thing first. The article stands on its own. You could read it, never buy anything, and still walk away with something useful. That’s the point. The template is just the shortcut for the readers who’d rather not build it themselves.
Why it works: On Medium, the article is the distribution. It’s the thing the algorithm surfaces, the thing that gets shared, the thing a stranger finds at 11pm while stuck on the exact problem you solved. The product page can’t do any of that. The article is the top of the funnel, and it’s free because free is what travels.
3. Package the Paid Version
What it is: Turn the raw byproduct into something a buyer can use in five minutes. Clean it up, write a README, explain how to install it, zip it, done.
This is the stage people over-engineer. You don’t need a landing page framework or a checkout funnel. My second product, the AI-Powered Second Brain Toolkit, was 8 Claude Code commands I already used on my own vault, bundled with a starter config file and a readme that explains setup for both Obsidian and plain Markdown. That’s it. Priced at $12.
I keep a short internal checklist for this so I’m not reinventing the packaging each time (core files, a README with a five-minute quick start, a changelog, a zip). Gumroad hosts the file and handles the payment. There’s no infrastructure to run.
Why it works: The gap between “a thing I use” and “a thing you can use” is smaller than it looks, and closing it is the entire value you’re charging for. People are paying to skip the assembly. The knowledge itself was already free in the article.
4. Link the Two
What it is: The article links to the product. The product links back to the article and the rest of your work. This single cross-link is the actual money mechanism, so don’t leave it out.
It sounds too simple to matter, but it’s the whole game. The free article does the reaching, builds the trust, and hands the reader a one-click path to the paid shortcut at the exact moment they want it. Skip the link and you’ve written a nice article that sells nothing.
When the second-brain article went out, it linked straight to the toolkit. Readers who wanted the commands didn’t have to rebuild them from the post. They clicked, paid $12, and installed in five minutes. The article did the convincing. The link did the converting.
Why it works: You’re catching intent at its peak. Someone who just read 2,000 words on your system and thought “I want this” is the warmest buyer you’ll ever get. The link is how you meet them there instead of hoping they find your storefront later. They won’t.
5. Run It on a Cadence
What it is: Do it again. And again. On a schedule you can actually keep, not a heroic sprint you’ll abandon.
One product is a fluke. A pipeline is a business. I listed the SDD Template one week, then shipped the second-brain toolkit the next. Two products in two weeks, both riding articles I was already writing. That’s when it stopped feeling like luck and started feeling like a motion.
I track the pipeline the same way I track blog posts, in a simple product calendar with a target buffer and a launch cadence. When a project throws off a good byproduct, it goes in the queue. The queue is what turns “I made a thing once” into “I ship a thing every couple of weeks.”
Why it works: This is trait number two from Part 1, recurring need, pointed at yourself. A single product decays. A cadence compounds, because every new product cross-links the old ones, every new article resurfaces a past product, and the catalog quietly grows while you sleep. ✨
The Real Numbers, Honestly
I promised honesty, so here’s the unglamorous version.
Two products. Three dollars and twelve dollars. I’m months in, not years, and I’m not quitting anything.
What I can prove is simpler than a revenue figure. The loop runs end to end, twice, with no marketing budget, no audience-building phase, and no extra project work. Both products came from assets that already existed, sold through articles I was already going to publish.
Here’s the honest math on why this is worth doing even at small numbers. The article gets written whether or not a product exists, because content generation was already trait seven, already part of why you picked the project. Adding the product is a few hours of packaging on top of work that was happening anyway. The downside is a wasted afternoon. The upside is a thing that sells for years. That’s an asymmetry worth taking every single time, even when the early receipts are measured in single-digit dollars.
Passive income is a misleading phrase. The selling runs while you sleep. The shipping never does. But the shipping was already the plan.
What Breaks (And What I’d Skip)
A few honest caveats, in the spirit of Part 2.
Don’t build the product first. If you invent a product and then go hunting for an audience, you’ve signed up for the cold-start startup grind this whole series exists to help you avoid. The byproduct has to come from real work you already did. No byproduct, no product. Go build something first.
Don’t price for greed. My products are $3 and $12 on purpose. At impulse-buy pricing, a reader doesn’t have to deliberate, they just grab it. Early on, you’re buying proof that the loop converts, not maximizing a transaction. You can raise prices once the catalog and the trust are real.
The free article has to actually be good. The loop dies at stage two if the article is a thinly veiled ad. Readers can smell it, and the algorithm punishes it. The article earns the sale by being worth reading even if nobody buys. If you’re not willing to give away the real thinking, this isn’t your model.
Keep the day job. I know that’s not the fantasy. It’s also what makes this sustainable. The job covers your life, so the products don’t have to, which means you can price them honestly, ship on a calm cadence, and never make a desperate decision. Financial pressure is what turns a fun side portfolio into a second job you resent.
That’s the Empire
Three parts, one system.
You pick projects that compound, using the 7-trait filter so you’re not building in the graveyard. You run all of them with an automation stack, so the connective tissue doesn’t bury you. And you close the loop by selling the byproducts, so the work that was already generating content quietly starts generating income too.
None of it required quitting, raising money, or becoming someone you’re not. It’s the same portfolio you’d have built anyway, with a loop bolted on top that turns its exhaust into products.
The empire was never about getting rich. It’s a small, interlocking system where the same hours pay you back three ways. Skills that transfer, an audience that grows, and now a catalog that sells. Compounding, the whole way down.
So here’s the last question of the series: what’s one byproduct sitting in your projects right now that a stranger would pay a few dollars to skip building themselves? That’s your first product. Name it in the comments, and I’ll help you figure out the article that sells it. 💡