6 months of Passive Income

But is it really "passive" income or maybe more "diversified" income. Let's discuss!

Hi everyone,

Back to normal schedule today with some insights on the 6 first months of the year and especially about my passive income. As I say above, this is not totally “passive” because I include this newsletter where I have to produce content in order to get subscriptions. But on the other hand, people can subscribe after the content is done and appreciate the archives. So I will talk about Passive Income to do it simple.

Back in January

If I already sold fonts before 2023, this year I started to go full products, no more client work, except 2 to be honest with whom I have worked for some time and I continue to help them on some cool projects.

In January I launched my first prints and this newsletter with paid subscriptions. So from that time I could count on these different sources of income:

• Fonts

• Prints

• Substack

• Domestika

• My book ( also in French)

My fonts are sold on my website but also via distributors which are Creative Market and ILoveTypography.

Milestones

During these 6 months, I launched 2 fonts, Scusi and Scusi Bruto.

Scusi Font in use

I made 6 prints, 5 fine art ones and a screen print.

I started a fonts challenge in Instagram which did last around 20 days ^^

And I wrote 36 newsletters/posts in which 16 were for paid subscribers. I opened for them a WhatsApp group to chat about type and my process, and I sent 16 prints to my founding members.

Click on the button below to get more info about subscriptions.

Which stats after 6 months?

First of all, I did create a spreadsheet to see, per product, how much I make each month. As you can see below, some months are really good and some are not so good.

This happens with good explanations though.

First of all, I think Creative Market did promote one of my font. I could not find where and how but in February and March I sold many licences for the same font. Maybe this is just “luck” or maybe the font appeared higher in the rankings because of some initial sales. No idea but I made some money there.

Also, I do promote my prints on short periods of time. I launched my prints in December if I remember well and did promote a lot in January. But stopped until I launched the Depression Sketch in June where I did communicate again.

I actually sold 12 out of 16 of this print in June (Orange/Pink is sold out).

Another interesting point is that I launched the paid subscriptions here in January too and made large part of my supporters within the 3 first months.

So this is no linear revenues every month. It really depends on my communication. And if I made the “30 days of fonts” challenge to better promote my fonts, I also need to post more regularly about my prints too. And not just when they come out.

Regarding the dispatching of my revenues, it is interesting to realise that this newsletter makes more money than I expected:

It does represent 19% of my revenues this year! Yesterday I wrote a paid post to my supporters explaining what I am going to focus on in the 6 next months and for sure I am going to put some time into my subscription model here, offering more benefits.

I did not talk about it yet but I still make good money with my book, available in 2 languages. And you don’t see Domestika in that graph because I did not make any money with it this year. Not that the course does not do well, I have right now around 700 students. But Domestika paid me in advance and up to now I did not reach the point where I make more money that the one they gave me.

Regarding prints, they represent something near than a third of my income. And just with promoting in January and June. So again, I need to spend more time communicating around them. And make more of them ;)

And last, let’s talk about fonts.

As I said above, I sold really good on Creative Market on this first half of the year. 40% comes from my shop, and only 12% comes from ILT. I talked about it too yesterday but I plan to work with some other distributors soon. So I can even more diversify fonts revenues and maybe focus more on lettering and prints.

More teaching to come

As I told you in the last newsletter, I am going to teach a new workshop in early September with ILT.

And I want to do more of teaching and sharing. So maybe I will do other online workshops or even IRL ones. This is not passive income when we talk about workshops but I would like to write more about “learning lettering” and I plan to do it in my subscription model. So hopefully in my end of 2023 graphs there will be a slice with “teaching” in it :)

I hope these informations are interesting and helpful. I hope the second part of the year will continue this way and even better. This is no tremendous income up to now but I also work way less, between 30 to max 50% of my time. So I will take what comes and try to make it better with the time I have.

Don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you have any question, I will be happy to help :)

Some inspiration for the weekend :)

Let’s finish that weekly post with a great series of videos made by Lincoln Design. They organise a design event “Into The Woods” and to promote it, they created interviews with the people who will be speaking or teaching workshops at the events. Here are the videos I urge you to watch to get some inspiration.

I did not watch all of them yet but the one with Cymone Wilder was really good because it was about making “bad type”, being honest in your work, doing you and not follow the trends, etc. A fantastic half an hour interview to watch now! :)

I think with this set of videos you have enough to do for some time ;-) Next week will be my last post before the summer break and I will talk about the Lisa Congdon class I am taking these days :)

Have a great weekend and see you next week!

Francis