I do a bit of freelance design work each month, but I've been working on a few products for designers to generate recurring income and solve some annoyances I have in my workflow and tools.
The first ( http://www.mockuprocket.com ) is close to finished and will be a desktop app to help quickly create design mockup presentations and upload them to your server. There are some services that do a similar thing but I've always preferred to keep client work on my server...especially for designs that need to kept under wraps until release. The app will also handle different layouts and let you customize the templates for each client so you can setup branding and so forth.
I'm a designer and front-end developer so it is my first serious attempt at building and creating something more involved and it's been a fun learning experience. Hopefully some other designers will find it useful and I can make a few bucks on it.
My wife is a self-published fiction author (http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Void/e/B0035Z08GI & http://www.stephanievoid.com ) mostly young adult fantasy/scifi. Visibility is the hardest thing when going independent because the Kindle/iTunes book stores are very hard to get found in. I actually think there is some sort of opportunity for a startup offering some kind of better book shopping experience with a bit of Netflix's recommendation engine or something.
She hasn't gotten enough visibility yet among her young adult audience to really take off but has been making enough each month that it is worth it. She keeps writing more books though so it should slowly increase over the years.
The first ( http://www.mockuprocket.com ) is close to finished and will be a desktop app to help quickly create design mockup presentations and upload them to your server. There are some services that do a similar thing but I've always preferred to keep client work on my server...especially for designs that need to kept under wraps until release. The app will also handle different layouts and let you customize the templates for each client so you can setup branding and so forth.
I'm a designer and front-end developer so it is my first serious attempt at building and creating something more involved and it's been a fun learning experience. Hopefully some other designers will find it useful and I can make a few bucks on it.
My wife is a self-published fiction author (http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Void/e/B0035Z08GI & http://www.stephanievoid.com ) mostly young adult fantasy/scifi. Visibility is the hardest thing when going independent because the Kindle/iTunes book stores are very hard to get found in. I actually think there is some sort of opportunity for a startup offering some kind of better book shopping experience with a bit of Netflix's recommendation engine or something.
She hasn't gotten enough visibility yet among her young adult audience to really take off but has been making enough each month that it is worth it. She keeps writing more books though so it should slowly increase over the years.