6 ms·
What was your best passive income in 2015?
What is your best source of 'passive' or recurring income?
previous links added in the comment
- joebaf 11y agoprevious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8201392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8201392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8395801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8395801
- herbst 11y agoI have a game related site i created for myself that now made $1700 (adsense) in december, and will reach about $1600 in januar, otherwise it was always just growing. Its so passive i did exactly nothing in december except restarting the box once. I also work on a full recreation of the website, because now i only make a small part of my target audience happy, the rest only clicks a few times and comes again after a few weeks. I am afraid shipping the new site will change my income tho :/
- joebaf 11y agowhat number of users/visitors daily do you have? 1700$ made from AdSense is pretty decent amount!
- herbst 11y agoFunny thing is there is even potential for much more. About 60% of my users come for a reason, which i fail to provide properly, but still am the only one that tries. They watch only 2-3 sites until they realize they already know the content, or that it sucks (the 2 available sorting options currently) until they come again a few weeks/months later. I could easily make them look at 4-10 sites on average if i optimize this part properly, and i am on it. I have had 3.5 Million view from 250k users with 500k sessions the last 30 days. Not to long ago i also had no idea that this Adsense rates are still possible, then again the site is also really active and as said just growing.
- joebaf 11y agowow.... that's a lot of views! so what's the link to your site? maybe I could copy your solution <evil><evil> :)
- zenbryo 11y agoI figured thats why you asked the question... ;)
- herbst 11y agoHaha, its actually also part the reason why i don't link it here right now, before i released the new site. Next to having a different account where i sometimes post it. And yeah it are indeed a lot of views, i am still surprised myself everytime i look into Google Anyalytics. Also the feeling when i noticed that i reached 96'000 on the Alexa international rating. Not bad.
- iSloth 11y agoRelease it to a few users, and monitor their usage and feedback to gauge if it's better or not.
- herbst 11y agoIts a totally different site in the end, that could lead to awkward situations. I thought about putting it on a subdomain (noindex?) and announce it in my blog, like a "feedback beta before release", but i am not sure if that would tell anything at all from the numbers.
- DrNuke 11y agoWritten digital content about nuclear energy at http://www.nuclearresearch.net http://www.nuclearresearch.net . Not much, really, but passive. New e-book coming later this week.
- wingerlang 11y agoHow are you counting writing passive? Sounds like it is the opposite.
- zenbryo 11y agoAll passive income require some initial work. Some more than others. But selling ebooks is something that can get you recurring sales just like "writing" apps, websites etc
- mywittyname 11y agoYou do something once and it earns income for a long time. It's no different than writing a program or building a website.
- kluck 11y agoThe kind of "passive" you mean would be truly awesome! Anyone an idea?
- wingerlang 11y agoMaintaining some let's just call them apps. Updating for new OS versions and so on.
- schappim 11y agoShopify Apps, the most trivial of which displays a snow effect using JavaScript.
- tixocloud 11y agoWhat's been your experience working with the Shopify platform?
- mr_overalls 11y agoIt turns out that I had more income from a single rental property than my tech entrepreneurship.
- baccredited 11y ago$93,917 for 2015. I was lucky enough to be born with gifts that make me good at writing code. I trade that coding ability for money. I invest that money in the S&P 500 (ticker VOO). I've been doing this for decades and have invested about $1,173,971 to date. The trailing 10 year return is about 8% per year. So let's call it $93,917. $93,917 of passive income.
- kohanz 11y agoWell done! Would you be willing to comment on what % of your income you invest each year (on average)? Also, have you suffered a "passive loss" in some years?
- mywittyname 11y agoIf all of his investments are in VOO as he claims, then he would have suffered several yearly losses. Some people only count only dividends as income. In this case, there would be no "passive loss", but the total income would only be ~2-3% pa instead of ~8% pa average.
- Someone1234 11y agoIndeed. When people talk about how well their investments are doing they should utilise a ten year yearly average (or longer). I bet that $93K figure doesn't include the years where they LOSE money, but a ten year yearly average would (e.g. making it 80K or similar). And as you said they definitely lost money during the recession if they're seeing 8% now. There's no way they're just doing that from bonds or dividends alone.
- SyneRyder 11y agoYou could get 8% from dividends if you're specifically hunting for dividend stocks, buying individual stocks, and only buy when they're at that level. The Australian stock market has had lots of opportunities like that over the years, where major brands have had falls that briefly made them terrific bargains. But it would have to be your specific strategy.
- dangrossman 11y agoImprovely (https://www.improvely.com https://www.improvely.com) and W3Counter (https://www.w3counter.com https://www.w3counter.com) have grown to $45,000 MRR. W3Counter is completely passive -- no new code or features in over a year, no customer support load, autoscaling frontend (EC2) and backend (Aurora). Improvely gets feature updates a few times a year and has some light e-mail support load. I continue to have no employees or contractors. Trying to diversify more in 2016.
- ssanders82 11y agoI love w3counter! $45k MRR - super impressive
- sauere 11y agoHow do you make money with w3counter?
- dangrossman 11y agoIt's freemium. People pay monthly or annually for extra features (real-time reports, e-mail summaries, multiple websites on one account, etc).
- kooso 11y agoyou better bother to reply to the emails I've sent to you, boy, a few months ago. You replied only to the 1 or 2 ones and turned a blind eyed to others.
- andersthue 11y agoMy total from http://www.watermark-image.com http://www.watermark-image.com last year has been around 35.000€ and it takes 5-10 minutes of support a day and 30-60 minutes once or twice a month doing bug features or new features. My new project http://timeblock.com http://timeblock.com that are funded by that income and that I do not write any code for has generated app. 2000€ in recurring revenue last year although it is not passive yet it is MRR :)
- ekr 11y agoAfter going through your timeblock app, I still don't know what exactly it is for, or why people would pay for that. I get that it is a sort of calendar with time tracking features. What makes it different from the thousands of other similar apps?
- andersthue 11y agoMost og all it is an agile method, improving communication and time in flow - the app is "just" a helper app that makes it easier to run the weekly meeting and get an overview of resource allocation and project eta's. Besides the RR we also help new users with their weekly meeting by facilitating a good communication.
- ghrifter 11y agoJust as an FYI looks like something is messed up with your directed quotes with your font like so: „normal“
- andersthue 11y agoThanks!
- someotheridiot 11y agohttps://rebrickable.com https://rebrickable.com - A LEGO database that shows you which sets you can build from your existing collection, also includes thousands of fan-submitted designs. I guess it would only loosely be called "passive" as I spend a lot of time on it. But, I can take vacations and it continues to earn... for a while :)
- Hydraulix989 11y agoI saw that site a couple weeks back. I have a giant tub of Legos in my attic. Very cool!
- joebaf 11y agoI've seen it some time ago and this site is great! it really brings value to users, so I am not surprised it's growing.
- ddgflorida 11y agohttp://convertcsv.com http://convertcsv.com - In 2015, I averaged $650/month by using google ads.The site converts delimited (CSV,TSV,...) data to and from different formats (JSON,SQL,HTML,..). It was written in HTML/Javascript and I average about 4 hours a month supporting it.
- tixocloud 11y agoThat's really interesting. What sort of ads do people click on. Do you know?
- ddgflorida 11y agoNo I don't know which ads are being clicked on, but I trust Google to make the best decision of which ads to display.
- Someone1234 11y agoWhat type of support requests do you handle for a site like that? Seems like much of it would be automated.
- ddgflorida 11y agoMost comments on the site are thanking me for the site or asking for specific enhancements. So support time consists of reading comments/emails and adding enhancements and/or an occasional bug fix.
- stevekemp 11y agohttps://dns-api.com https://dns-api.com - A system which wraps Amazon's route53 with git, allowing simple updates to DNS with complete revision history.