Pat Flynn

Pat Flynn is an entrepreneur and online business educator who founded Smart Passive Income in 2008 after being laid off from an architecture firm. He built a study guide website for an architecture licensing exam, monetized it through affiliate marketing, and subsequently expanded into broader online business education covering blogging, podcasting, affiliate marketing, and digital product sales. He is known for publishing monthly income reports that disclosed his revenue sources and amounts, a practice that was uncommon in online business media when he began.

His Smart Passive Income podcast, launched in 2010, features interviews with online business builders and accumulated a large following in the entrepreneurship podcast space. His content has covered practical topics including email list building, course creation, and podcast monetization, with an emphasis on sharing both successes and failures from his own experience. He has been generally well-regarded within the online business education space for transparency about his income and business processes.

Flynn's business model is the same as many online business educators: the free content on YouTube, podcasts, and his blog drives audience to paid courses, communities, and affiliate partnerships. Affiliate income from recommending business tools is a significant revenue source, which is disclosed but creates the standard structural incentive of any affiliate-funded content. Some critics of the passive income genre have noted that the scale of earnings Flynn describes from his various ventures is difficult for most followers to replicate given differences in timing, audience access, and capital.

His more recent work has shifted toward community-building and supporting creators with more complex business models than the original passive income content covered. He has been active in the creator economy for over fifteen years, making him one of the longer-standing figures in the online business education space.