In parts 1 and 2, Kate and I came up with lots of ideas that didn’t fit into the parameters of our Financial Freedom goals. And we came up with two possible options that we wanted to talk about some more:

• Creating content pages and generating revenue from advertising on those pages
• Creating an online store to sell custom software that gets delivered to the customer through downloading

But when we started talking about option 2, we realized we had missed a third obvious option. This option involved creating a web site that performed a service that people would pay regular fees for some kind of online processing. At first this seemed like a bad idea. Any on-line application that we could think of was available for free. We certainly couldn’t create an on-line email system, and compete with GMail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail - all of which were available to customers for free.

But then we remembered our goal of creating cash-flow for the long haul. What if we created an application. Not an application that customers could buy and download, but instead an application that was on-line and available for a monthly fee. Instead of getting a one-time sale from the customer, we would get continuous monthly revenue from the customers.

It’s sort of like the cable TV company. They don’t sell you a box for $300 that will get you cable TV channels for the rest of your life, right? Instead they sell you a $30 monthly subscription that you have practically forever. After 1 year, they’ve beaten the one-time profit of selling the box, and you keep on giving them money…pretty much until you move out of town.

We did the math quickly. If we created a software package and sold it for $79.95, we could equate that to selling an on-line service for $9.95/month for 8 months (very rough numbers, obviously there would be hosting costs etc.), and after that, the cash keeps coming in.

Of course the really tough part of this is picking the product. If someone only needs our product once, the on-line option sounds bad. We would really need to create a service that customers would sign up for and keep for a long time.

That sounds tough. But still not impossible. We put a check mark next to it and marked this one “possible” too. Excellent! We have three categories of ideas we like already. Now it’s time to dig a little deeper and try to see what we can come up with for each of those categories.