How PassiveStrategies Started
What began as a single Laravel site turned into a portfolio of 20+ properties. Here's how it happened — the decisions, mistakes, and hard-won lessons along the way.
It started with one deals site. Honestly, it started with frustration — watching affiliate income disappear into a platform we didn't control, and deciding to build something we owned instead.
The first site was rough. A stock Laravel install, some copy-pasted deal-scraping logic, and an Amazon Associates tag slapped on everything. It worked well enough to be encouraging and badly enough to teach us a lot.
The Decision to Build a Shared Foundation
By the time we had three deals sites, we were copying code manually between repos. When we fixed a bug in one, we had to remember to fix it in two others. When we added a feature, it existed in one place and not the others. This is the classic multi-repo trap.
We built laravelbase — a shared Laravel skeleton that all our sites share as a git ancestor. Upstream changes flow down through the hierarchy. Tier 1 (laravelbase) → Tier 2 (platform repos) → Tier 3 (brand sites). It's not a perfect system, but it means a shared Blade component or CSS fix reaches all 20+ sites with one merge instead of 20 copy-pastes.
From Deals Sites to SaaS
The deals sites taught us what our audience actually wanted. The South Asian diaspora — Bollywood fans, deal hunters, Muslim community members — is underserved by mainstream content. Sites built specifically for them do better than generic sites trying to be everything to everyone.
That insight led to DealRaj — a multi-tenant deals SaaS that lets us serve eight different brand audiences from a single codebase. Each site has its own domain, branding, and product catalog, but shares the underlying platform. One fix improves all eight. That's the leverage we were looking for.
Family Involvement
This is a family operation. Sumrana runs a teaching and parenting blog. Khaliq — who's been in IT for years and is learning SAP — has his own portfolio site. Sharjeel brings nearly a decade of Blogger-era writing to his personal blog. Rahat Maskan is a family heritage project.
None of this is a polished corporate story. It's a family figuring out how to build sustainable income while doing things we'd actually want to do anyway. The LLC paperwork is pending. The revenue is real but modest. The learning curve has been steep and ongoing.
Why We're Documenting It Publicly
There's no shortage of "how I built a 7-figure passive income empire" content online. Almost none of it is honest about the timeline, the failures, or the months where nothing grew. We think other builders deserve the honest version of the journey — the bugs, the pivots, the decisions that turned out to be wrong, and the ones that worked.
We're documenting it all publicly because we think other builders can learn from the honest version of the journey. That's why this blog exists.