These days, many startups dream of becoming a unicorn nowadays. For an indie maker I think it may be better to aim for a centipede instead. Running several business models around one product can make you less vulnerable to setbacks.
A unicorn is a term in the business world to indicate a privately held startup company valued at over $1.000.000.000, such as Airbnb, Uber and Dropbox. The term was coined in 2013 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures.
Because such outcomes are rare, most startups will never reach that valuation. That gives indie makers a reason to consider another strategy.
I think a business with multiple revenue streams often develops naturally. Because it is important to maintain focus, ideally you stick with one product and expand its revenue streams over time.
In my experience, when you are able to stay obsessed with your goals, keep optimizing your product on a daily basis and think in the long term, new opportunities can emerge.
Most makers start with selling a simple one-time purchase, or a subscription service. Either can be a good starting point. With most products, over time you'll discover they are also marketable to businesses, or vice versa when you start as a B2B product.
It gets especially interesting when a new revenue stream that doesn't depend on the same marketing channel.
For my passport photo product I started out in 2010 as a consumer website. SEO has always been my main acquisition channel. Because I have kept improving that channel, the website now has almost 1.000 pages on the topic (passport photos), making it a useful source for people searching for passport-photo information.
Because of this, I can easily add new pages about the topic and rank immediately with them. That makes the website feel like a piece of online real estate. Eventually, I could ask competing photographers to pay for native ads on their city’s landing page on my website. The channel for this revenue stream is cold emailing.
Furthermore, because I kept developing the photo app over those ten years, it eventually became good enough for organizations such as universities, hospitals and corporates to want to use it in their work. This was yet another additional revenue stream for me, with a different channel again (word of mouth).
Running these models through different channels reduces my dependence on any one source of income, including if government rules change.