You know what’s great? Digital goods. In July of 2011, I launched a little store selling a little icon set called Tipogram. It comes packaged as a set of vectors and an embeddable font-face you can use on the web. I even wrote a long, rambling blog post about how I did it. Since then, I’ve done basically no marketing, changed the website exactly once and still rack up a new sale every day or two.

Let’s talk sunk time – I think I spent maybe two weeks, on and off, building the thing – mostly evenings and weekends. It’s pretty damn easy to cork out a handful of icons per night, even if you’re doing the full complement. That’s ninety icons if you want to use pretty much all the keyboard keys – and it took less time than you can say “Dang, that’s a lot of icons, chief”. So realistically, building a nice little digital product like this is not a huge time investment.

I launched the Tipogram site on a Tuesday afternoon basically because that’s when it was done. I tweeted from the Tipogram Twitter account (current followers as of this writing: 41) and retweeted it with my personal account (current followers: 523). This got some early attention and I got some retweets and/or shout-outs from some lovely people with 5000+ followers… and by some, I mean two. I’m sure it helped and I am super grateful, but it seems to have spread pretty organically since then.

So then what happened? Around the middle of September 2011, sales stopped dead. Upcoming holiday ennui? Market saturation? In need of mo’ betta marketing? Perhaps all of those things. I let it stew for a while and then dropped the price from $24 to $18. Middling November, sales took a nice uptick and continued apace to now. I made no other changes and announced the price drop exactly the same way I announced Tipogram for the first time – one tweet from Tipogram, one retweet from me personally.

It’s definitely not making enough money for me to retire to a swank beachfront bungalow, but what it’s proven to me is the value of a digital goods business – it’s basically a fire-and-forget moneymaker (if you’ve done your homework on your target market, of course). If I could set up a few more mini-businesses that perform at the same level, I’d be happier than the proverbial pig in the proverbial shit.

Here’s the point: even if you suck hard at marketing and have a comparatively small ‘network’, it’s still possible to build something that generates ongoing and maintenance-free income month after month after month. Worth it? I think so.