Tech sophistication can be as little as a single PHP webpage or maybe less (There is a blogpost somewhere, from the creator Levelsio) There was a "million dolar page".
Marketing is hard, except if you get lucky.
I'd generally still argue that marketing is the hardest part of any side-hustle / startup in general. What is lost on many here is that $100/mo. spend on solid marketing could speed up the growth curve (without that much more engineering effort) so that it would take maybe a year instead of three to reach the point you could quit your day job.
I released my own app a month ago after working on it on the side for a year... and I am finding that marketing is important indeed. Just having something in the app store doesn't guarantee eyeballs.
You have to find ways of getting your message out. No matter how good your product is, if your users can't find it, you won't sell anything.
This is probably why it's important to make sure you're not doing it for the "easy money" and also why it can take months or years to make a nice little passive income; the word takes a while to get out.
Totally agree, I have a number of non-tech related side hustles and quite frankly I prefer these to tech ones because they took maybe 50hrs each to setup and 2 hours max per week to operate. I know for a fact it'd take much more time tech wise to get something of equivalent revenue up and running.
I have to question these "I spent years making $40 a month working 8 hours after hours to built <project> but now <project> makes $60k a month" stories, since at some point you really have to ask yourself how much your time is worth. Thousands of hours for $1M pre-tax, not to mention how much life you gave up for that is kind of idiotic IMO.
My metric generally is, "if someone on etsy selling magic rocks is making more than my tech project after three months, time to move on". I'm not being shitty, this is just a standard I hold myself to when it comes to valuing my personal time. Also, don't worry, I'm not one of these people who thinks my time isn't worth cooking or cleaning (like many YT gurus and even Financial Samurai now claim).
