Remember me telling you about my brother Ric entering the online entrepreneurial field by writing and selling a gardening book, High Density Gardening?
Crappy salesletter which I’m going to help him rewrite when we get together in the next couple of weeks, but brilliantly authoritative veggie and herb gardening book, and if you’re at all interested in growing your own food in these recession hit times, you should definitely buy it 
Just don’t read the salesletter too closely because it’s not converting well, meaning it might stop you buying a good product, so just have a quick glance then scroll down to the buy button (unless you’re a salesletter writing expert in which case you might be able to offer him a few tips via the email link at the bottom of the page)
Well that was a rather rambling intro to saying that product creation must run in the family because Rics teenage son, Andrew, has just released an Xbox Live game that’s immediately making sales.
Within a few hours he’d made 16 sales with zero publicity and the figures just kept climbing. By day two he was up to 29 sales and he’d more than doubled that by day four.
If you’re not an Xbox user you probably haven’t heard of Xbox Live (I hadn’t) it’s where you play games online for a small subscription fee, and people (with the knowledge and skills) can upload their own creations for sale.
Not sure how old Andrew is, about 18 I think, though he looks about 12 ( I just said that to wind him up, the way uncles do ) and he’s been a gamer for years, but this is the very first game he’s created after teaching himself how to program.
It’s a simple word game – a version of Sudoko, and he wrote it in just a few days over Easter.
The twist is that the puzzle is already completed, you just have to fit the pieces together! You have 9 different puzzles and three difficulty settings to choose from, so either pass the time with an easy puzzle or challenge yourself with a difficulty one.
He’s called it JigDoku, and get this – there’s already over 900 references to it in Google (most of them referring to his game) in just a week or so.
Andrew says “I’ve worked out that if I can just get 5 sales a day that will amount to $250 USD a month which sounds good seeing it hardly took anytime to program. And I haven’t done anything to promote it yet so it could make more.”
Been a smart kid he’s done some research of course, and says that most people on the Xbox Live developers forum, are reporting that their games that have been up for a while are getting around 10 downloads a day which only earns them $17. But $17 a day a game in passive income is nothing to complain about for a student.
And one person he knows makes “about 800 a week from a game”
Andrew’s now written another Xbox Live game, which has to go through a review process before being allowed to go on sale.
“This new game isn’t anything brilliant or good for that matter. It was something I threw together in a few hours to see how many trials this sort of game can get. I say game but its not really a game, more like an application.”
Now imagine if he finds that this one makes money too. Providing he can come up with enough new ideas he can get a lot of games up quickly and pay for his education.
I can see this teenager never needing to worry about having to get a job.
Most of us aren’t programmers. I couldn’t even program my cat to beg for food, never mind learn how to set the timer on the hard drive recorder connected to my TV, and you’re probably not a programmer either.
But think about it. You could do JUST the same with product creation. Pump out a series of short reports. Build a ‘buyers’ list. Create a high end product and sell it to that list. And say goodbye to your job.