214. Why I Killed a $150,000 Passive Income Stream

<p>There’s an expression, to burn your boats. It originated with a military strategy. Hernán Cortés famously “burned the boats,” after arriving in the New World to conquer the Aztec empire. (He actually “scuttled” his ships. He sunk them.)</p> <p>I recently burned my boats, when I killed off a $150,000 passive revenue stream.</p> <h3 id="thebirthofapassiveincomemuse">The birth of a passive income muse</h3> <p>In March of 2007, I was sitting with some friends on the cable-locked chairs and tables – at two in the morning – on the porch of a closed restaurant in Austin, Texas.</p> <p>We were doing the kind of thing that we did at the time, after a night of parties at the SXSW conference: We’d sit around and talk about our ideas. Facebook and Twitter were still fringe services – most of the mainstream world knew nothing about them. The internet seemed full of opportunities.</p> <p>The subject of my dating life came up. I was terrible at finding a girlfriend, but I was good at finding dates. I described in great detail to my friends the way I had optimized my process of online dating. I had something to say about what you should write in your profile, what your pictures should be like, and what to say in your messages.</p> <p>I’ve since learned that this is the way I approach many things. I like to get deep into the details, to break it down into a framework, then do my best to explain it in a clear way.</p> <p>I thought I was talking about something very obvious or unexceptional, like tying your shoes, but my friends were on the edges of their seats.</p> <p>As was standard at SXSW at the time, whatever you talked about, there was an idea for a business there. “You HAVE to blog about this,” one friend said. Then, of course, the rest of them piled on.</p> <p>Now, almost 13 years later, I’ve made well over $150,000 off of the blog that I created because of that conversation.</p> <h3 id="iburnedmyboats">I burned my boats</h3> <p>Last month, I killed this blog. I didn’t so much kill it as I let it expire. Literally, I sim