Reading · Anna Mack's Stack

I’ve never talked publicly about how much money I make. Sharing numbers has always felt gross to me, a little spammy, like it would instantly paint me as a peddler of portfolio career and passive income myths. But money is one of my favourite topics to discuss offline, so today I’ve decided to rip off the bandaid and talk about it online too.

In today’s episode of ‘money chat’ we’re discussing passive income, and specifically how passive income is largely a myth.

I feel somewhat qualified to talk about this because over the last year or so I’ve made more than $100k from digital products. Over half of that was banked in a 2 month period during the launch of my first product, The Portfolio Career Operating System, and almost every sale has been the result of organically posting online (I dabbled in Meta ads for a hot second before putting it in the too-hard-for-right-now basket. This reminds me…I should revisit).

Some people might assume this $100k casually rolled right into my bank account but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Building and selling something of value has taken an eye watering amount of time, effort and experimentation. I shudder to look back at how long I’ve spent working towards that sales target: obsessing over customer problems, interviewing people, seeking feedback on MVPs, designing and redesigning, figuring out Stripe, figuring out international sales tax (the death of me!), showing up online every day for years, writing thoughtful essays, filming a gazillion videos, building funnels and throwing my toys of out the Meta ad pram.

It’s very much been an active process, nothing passive about it.

When it comes to earning money independently, you can build three buckets of income:

Linear income

This is money earned for time. Think a full-time job or charging a day rate to clients. Exchanging time for cash is the easiest entry point into self employment, and it’s how I structured the first two years of my portfolio career until I made the not-inconsequential decision to jump off the day-rate treadmill, wind down my fractional roles and try to figure out how to consciously uncouple my earnings from hours spent.

Passive income

This is income acquired with little to no labour. For me, it invokes images of sitting in a plush red velvet robe, feet up, tobacco pipe in hand, chuckling maniacally while watching the dollars fly in. A lot of people lust after passive income without realising that generally speaking it doesn’t exist (unless your surname rhymes with dusk or you’re an equally unethical, exploitative type of billionaire).

Scalable income

Scalable income is any income that grows without a proportional increase in your time. It’s real and can be a hugely powerful lever, but it requires a ton of work (ie. it’s not passive).

I first learned the true power of scalable income last November. At the time, my boyfriend and I were about jet-set off to Northern Europe for a month long vacay. A couple of weeks before wheels up, I decided to pull together a Black Friday sale as part of my post-Euro cash injection strategy, which I hoped would soften the blow of having to pay $35 for a glass of wine (hello Copenhagen). I quickly whipped up a few sales emails and social posts, and scheduled everything to go live when Black Friday rolled around in a few weeks.

Later that month as we were cruising through the Norwegian Fjords, my sale kicked into gear and over the next 4 days I generated $15k in incremental cash (just about enough to cover the holiday wine consumption). In that moment I viscerally understood what it meant to have a financial lever, one that was divorced almost entirely from my time.

If you want to start building a scalable income stream that's decoupled from your time and energy, I have 2 mentoring spots left for April/May and would be happy to help you do it. Learn about how I can support you here.

There are pros and cons to every way of earning. Client work has a ceiling, sure, but scalable income has a wonky floor that can collapse at any time. What’s more important to you? Security or leverage? Risk or reward?
Focus on finding a shared problem that many people experience. What do people in your orbit or industry constantly lament, complain about, or wish they could do differently? What annoying problem have you solved for yourself that others might be experiencing too? The Portfolio Career OS was born from my personal overwhelm of managing and marketing multiple income streams at once. It became a viable product idea when I learned that many others were struggling with this too
If you don’t know what people’s problems are, ask them. Reach out, jump on a call, transcribe your conversations and ask Claude to pick up on patterns. If you’ve heard the same thing 10 times from 10 different people, that’s a solid signal
Build the scrappiest version of your product possible and share it with the people you just spoke to. Collect their constructive feedback while your ego stays at the door
Making money from products requires volume, and volume requires distribution (an email list, social following, ideally both). Growing an audience takes longer than creating a product, so if you’re serious about this path, start now
The day you launch your product is the day you step into your new role: Head of Non-Stop Promotion. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this process involves building once and selling many times, and 99% of your effort will need to be spent on the ‘sell many times’ part
The good news is that you don’t need to have marketing experience to do this (I didn’t). Like anything you can learn

If you’re at the beginning of your ‘jumping off the day-rate treadmill’ journey, it probably feels like you’re staring up at a mountain with no peak in sight. But scalable income (unlike passive income) exists. It’s real, it’s possible. So take the first step. Reach out to one person. Have one conversation. Identify one problem. Workshop one solution.

Crawl. Walk. Run.

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I made over $100k from digital products and nothing about it was passive

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