Sometimes I hear stories of technical info product entrepreneurs who launch info products and make a few thousand bucks but keep their day jobs and never “escape the rat race” via their technical products.

If I hear a relatively large number of these “ho-hum success” stories and a relatively small number of REAL success stories, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that technical info products just don’t lend themselves that well to earning a full-time living, and that the odds of escaping the day job via technical info products are low due to some inherent flaw of the technical info product model.

However, drawing such a conclusion (that something about technical info products makes it hard/impossible to earn a living from them) is certainly wrong, and probably a symptom of selection bias and perhaps some other logical fallacies.

Maybe I hear 10 stories of “ho-hum success” and 1 story of “real success”. But maybe there are 1000 other real success stories I just haven’t heard about. Maybe out of those 10 ho-hum successes I heard about, 9 of those entrepreneurs just genuinely didn’t put forth enough effort, so the problem doesn’t lie in the technical info product model, it lies in the laziness (for lack of a better word) of the would-be entrepreneurs.

As an antidote to the ho-hum success stories I’ve heard, I want to share a list of real technical info product successes. Below is a list of people who I understand are earning a good full-time living from technical info products.

The list

Chris Oliver, GoRails
Joel Hooks, Egghead
Wes Bos, wesbos.com
Todd Motto, toddmotto.com
Ari Lerner and Nate Murray, fullstack.io
Avdi Grimm, Virtuous Code
Michael Hartl, Learn Enough