18 ms·

Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

327 points by nns 11y ago

Please share suggestions of whats worked for you and what hasnt

max_ 11y ago
-Build a BTC gumroad version. -AI stuff like http://predictor.ai http://predictor.ai
- caipre 11y ago
  Broken link?
  - herbst 11y ago
    I assume he ment predicto.ai but its just a mess of text for me. Site broken, stylesheet blocked, something like this
    - zingermc 11y ago
      The problem is his SSL certificate expired last week! You can see the site if you go to https://www.predicto.ai/ https://www.predicto.ai/ and make a security exception.
  - max_ 11y ago
    Try https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller
- herbst 11y ago
  http://i.imgur.com/RbOznIO.png http://i.imgur.com/RbOznIO.png So thats how success looks like ;)
  - ovi256 11y ago
    Perfectly readable on lynx! http://imgur.com/JmZq2jt http://imgur.com/JmZq2jt
  - livingparadox 11y ago
    It looks like it needs the www subdomain. http://www.predicto.ai/ http://www.predicto.ai/
    - brandoncordell 11y ago
      Still won't render correctly in Chrome.
      - max_ 11y ago
        https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller HN doesn't aloow me to edit Links after an Hour...
    - max_ 11y ago
      No it is https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    "Best viewed in IE 6.0"?
    - max_ 11y ago
      N0,,, best views in chrome :D https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller
  - max_ 11y ago
    It needs to be on HTTPS https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller HN doesn't allow me to edit Links after an Hour...
- techstrategist 11y ago
  Expired SSL cert killing stylesheets on http:/predicto.ai.
- livingparadox 11y ago
  I think you meant http://www.predicto.ai/ http://www.predicto.ai/
  - max_ 11y ago
    No i meant https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller ....Sorry
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- max_ 11y ago
  Sorry for that Embarrassing broken link, The URL is actually https://predictors.ai/ https://predictors.ai/ and an example project that I recommended for the you guys was https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller * P.S HN should take half the blame for disabling editing after a while
SyneRyder 11y ago
There were a couple of posts with answers to this a month ago, you might find good suggestions there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10726489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10726489
33a 11y ago
Save money and invest it.
- nns 11y ago
  Can you give examples of what kind of low-touch reasonable-return investments you've benefited from?
  - jstanley 11y ago
    Any low-fees index fund.
    - mcshicks 11y ago
      Vanguard had very low fee reit index funds. If you want to generate income it is a good option (as opposed to stock index funds) because reits are required to pay 90% of their income as dividends. You can look at all the historical dividend data on the website
      - owyn 11y ago
        I parked some money in a vanguard reit a year ago as an experiment, and to create more of a balanced portfolio. Yes, it has paid quarterly dividends but it's also down -11% in total. So as usual, it all depends...
      - Spooky23 11y ago
        They tend to be very volatile though. The VIG (Vanguard Dividend ETF) pays 2.4%. Dollar-cost average in on bad market days.
      - stcredzero 11y ago
        Is there a Bay Area REIT index fund?
    - SilasX 11y ago
      In terms of throwing off a lot of passive income, they just aren't very good though. Looking mainly at income-generating investments, the best index one might be Vanguard LifeStrategy income (with provides income and moderate capital appreciation to protect against inflation). The yield? 2.1% Nothing to write home about. [1] Is there some high-yielding, regular-income fund I should know about? Even allowing for sorta-irregular funds, you probably can't do much better in this environment, though I'd like to be proven wrong. [1] https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0723&FundIntExt=INT#tab=4 https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0723&...
taytus 11y ago
We are looking for investors...
- goldenkey 11y ago
  Isn't everyone looking for love...
AznHisoka 11y ago
On-demand proxies that you spin up in 1 second. I can spin out cloud servers in an instant.. but I have to wait days for my proxies to be activated.
- bobby_9x 11y ago
  This isn't really passive. Most people need lots of support and the servers will need to be constantly checked for abuse.
- iamroot 11y ago
  Can't you spin up a cloud server and install a proxy in short order?
- iDemonix 11y ago
  If you can spin out a cloud server in an instant, why can't you install and configure some proxy software in about 10 minutes?
- hackerboos 11y ago
  I SSH tunnel when I need a foreign IP.
benologist 11y ago
Amazon recently launched a new app store that pays developers by the minute in lieu of all other monetization techniques, it's great if you can come up with engaging apps. https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground
- slig 11y ago
  One success story of a small company on Amazon Underground - https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-money-on-android-4ada61d127ed https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-mone... TL;DR: they have a Jigsaw Puzzle Android App and make shitloads of money on Amazon Underground.
  - benologist 11y ago
    That's me. I now have a Sudoku app launched too, and a new 1200 piece jigsaw to launch this month, and a word search next month.
    - swah 11y ago
      Thanks for writing that post!
- wtracy 11y ago
  Am I understanding correctly that Amazon is only monetizing Underground through interstitials at app launch time? If so, I'm impressed.
  - benologist 11y ago
    For now yeah that's all they do, and the 'underground app' itself is tied in with your amazon.com searches advertising stuff you've been browsing.
- chc4 11y ago
  "it's great if you can come up with engaging apps" ...and the Amazon app marketplace has a miraculous recovery and somehow because a legitimate revenue source. It probably speaks volumes how badly their device sales are on how likely that is.
edent 11y ago
* Apps with ads in them. Easy enough to churn out, but decreasing revenues and most of the high earning adverts are the scummiest. Low value and of low moral usefulness. * Solar Panels. In the UK, the government pays you per kWh generated. Needs an upfront investment, but stable income and you reduce your own energy bills. See http://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar http://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar * Renting out property. Needs a much larger initial investment, and requires ongoing maintenance. On a good month I only hear from the managing agent once per month with details of how much rent is being paid. * Stoozing. Find a credit card with 0% interest on balance transfers. Stick the money into a savings account. Or, if you like risk, on a horse. Need a good credit rating and decent savings rate to make more than a few hundred a year though. * Affiliate marketing. If you can find a good theme (e.g. Halloween) and a decent place to put the links (somewhere that wants them - not spamming them everywhere) it's possible to get a moderate passive income. Well... not quite passive, requires upfront time commitment of selecting links and locations. * Hosting / simple websites. Again, little bit of up-front commitment. Works best if you can find a local niche of people who want a friendly face to host their websites. Usually as simple as buying a domain, setting up WordPress, and turning on automatic updates. In general, the best passive schemes require a large initial outlay and/or a dubious moral outlook. A better way to enhance your income is to eat out less, stop buying stuff you don't need, and shop around for deals. Boring but true!
- Confiks 11y ago
  > Solar Panels. In the UK, the government pays you per kWh generated. Needs an upfront investment (...) It also required upfront confidence in the sustainability of the government subsidy. In The Netherlands a lot of now-solar panel owners decided to invest because of subsidies, but last year the government decided to stop the subsidy for 2016. Especially with the low energy prices, that makes it a net loss for a lot of people.
  - navbaker 11y ago
    Nevada just did the same thing.
  - jsingleton 11y ago
shireboy 11y ago
eBooks worked for me in 2014 & 15. I am the author of an ebook Trello Dojo (https://leanpub.com/trellodojo https://leanpub.com/trellodojo). I update it periodically and earn a couple hundred dollars a month. Lots of people from all over the world tell me it has helped them, which feels like I'm doing honest, good work with it. I'm not going to retire early from just that, but really want to do a few more, and possibly expand that concept into niche sites/training/etc. niche sites and blogging have not panned out for me (yet). I feel that's more a lack of time/effort on my part. A test effort showed me my niche could work, but I just haven't committed to really getting it rolling. I'm also a software developer and have a few service type sites up my sleeve. My thinking (as yet unproven in my own life) is that relatively simple subscription services that "do one thing well" and can be marketed to businesses and government agencies can earn well with minimal ongoing investment. The trick there would be to automate as much as possible- especially support- without sacrificing quality, and periodically dedicate resources to keeping the technology current (easier said than done, I know) It's hard to balance a current "non-passive" job, family, and side passive gigs, but it _can be done_.
abatista111 11y ago
I built a education platform and plan to charge monthly once I get more students.. http://thinkacademy.io/ http://thinkacademy.io/ http://thinkacademy.io/courses/1/learn-ruby-on-rails-in-4-weeks http://thinkacademy.io/courses/1/learn-ruby-on-rails-in-4-we...
CryoLogic 11y ago
Here's my experiences for last year in passive income: Total Gross Revenues: $20,000 or so. Mostly from a single high-traffic niche site which I promote almost exclusively through social media. My site offers a free version of what a few other websites in the same niche offer as a SaaS service. From that same site, most of the revenue (~80%) is from ads (ad revenue increased when switching to responsive units). Next, Amazon associate makes up about 15% of the revenue. And about 5% from donations. The downside is that ad rates are DROPPING pretty quickly, ad-block usage rates are increasing rapidly, some browsers block ads by default now, etc. So I'm trying to get off of ad dependency. I'm thinking in the future a Patreon funded project or project with additional SaaS component will probably fare better if you traffic is at least medium size (~50k/mo+), and comprised of repeat visitors. I also have eBooks, which despite the rapid increase in popularity of Amazon authors, seem to be doing well. My most popular eBook is bringing in ~40$ / mo on the 35% plan (I can't use the 70% plan because someone stole it and uploaded it elsewhere). The rest of my eBooks are bringing in ~$20 total. If you have expertise, and strong communication skills - eBooks may be a good route to go down. Leanpub offers higher % rate, and I've seen some technical authors make a killing there - might be a better option. As far as stocks go, I'm all invested in Vanguard which seems to like tech stocks - so not so great this year. The high-dividend yield funds are probably the way to go in 2016 since growth growth isn't so hot right now. I would stay away from IoS & Android because app discovery is messed up, and you need a marketing budget in most scenarios to make it big.
- nefitty 11y ago
  I'm interested in your path to the free SaaS tool. Do you think it would be viable to outsource the creation of tools to compete with popular, paid ones, offer the outsourced tool for free, and rake in ad-revenue/e-book sales? With proper marketing and seo a person could probably break even within a few months. Is that anything like what you did?
  - CryoLogic 11y ago
    I've never outsourced anything, because I've found that usually websites end up with a "core audience", aka maybe 100-500 people who make up the bulk of discussion, feedback, etc. I like to build relationships with these people, to better understand my audience. Plus they usually market my sites for me. It's a pretty painstakingly long process though. On the other hand, I've read about owners of tools (like ListenToYouTube, W3Counter) - who run just a tool by itself with little or no social features. If it's just the tool the audience wants, it may be totally possible to outsource the creation - and than just focus on marketing it. I'd like to see someone take a SaaS tool, outsource the development - release it for free (ad-funded or similar) and post a case study.
throwaway600613 11y ago
Peer-to-peer lending can potentially be a great source of passive income. For example, if you invested $100,000 in lower grade (C-G) notes on Lending Club with an aggregate 12.0% net annualized return, you'd receive approximately $6,000 in cash payments each month.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  Default rates on Lending Club are high enough you get ~33% of the quoted interest rate due to defaults.
  - adenadel 11y ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong, but do you have data supporting this statement? I've been interested in peer to peer lending for awhile and this turns me off a bit.
    - twohlix_ 11y ago
      I've made 8-10% per year (defaults included) for the past 2 years on lending club. There are investment limits based on your income that you legally have to follow. I believe its 5% of your income/assets max. They don't confirm your income/assets but there are regulations related to it. It also takes work to liquidate quickly. So if not selling notes on a second market you're locked into your investments for up to 5 years.
      - MikeTV 11y ago
        Thanks for this, didn't know there was a limit. Apparently it's 10% of your net worth [0] and there are other restrictions by state [1]. Which is a shame, because it beats the pants off the stock market. [0] http://kb.lendingclub.com/investor/articles/Investor/Is-there-a-maximum-investment-amount http://kb.lendingclub.com/investor/articles/Investor/Is-ther... [1] http://kb.lendingclub.com/investor/articles/Investor/What-are-the-current-State-and-Financial-Suitability-conditions http://kb.lendingclub.com/investor/articles/Investor/What-ar...
jerguismi 11y ago
Bitcoin arbitrage.
- lfx 11y ago
  Correct my if I'm wrong but bitcoin arbitrage doesn't seem like good idea, here is pretty good explanation - https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-price-arbitrage-explored/ https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-price-arbitrage-expl... I would better put my money in more "real" etf's and start from there.
  - joeyspn 11y ago
    > Correct my if I'm wrong... You are very wrong, plus you are talking to jerguismi (localbitcoin's founder), who I'd presume has made quite a bit from arbitrage in the space...
    - jklein11 11y ago
      The article does make a very interesting point. One which I'm hoping jerguismi could respond to. The article talks about the slow transaction time being a barrier to arbitrage. Basically, you couldn't buy in one market and sell in another market simultaneously. Wouldn't that make an arbitrage opportunity speculative? Also, because jerguismi is a founder of a bitcoin exchange, isn't it in his interest to promote trading bitcoin? I have no reason to believe that jerguismi would misrepresent his knowledge, but I think his role in the bitcoin community isn't de facto evidence that his statement is true.
      - joeyspn 11y ago
        > The article talks about the slow transaction time being a barrier to arbitrage. The article is wrong on many levels. You don't need to transact (or even own) bitcoins in order to arbitrage. You can just buy/sell and open short/long positions via the exchanges websockets API... Not WallSt speed, but a decent speed for any self-made bot vs point&click traders.
AJay17 11y ago
This was mine: http://www.thingsunder15.com http://www.thingsunder15.com
- pitchups 11y ago
  Looks great - is it making you any money?
  - AJay17 11y ago
    Thanks! It's anywhere from $100 to $200 a month, more around Christmas time.
    - J-dawg 11y ago
      This is great! Is all of that income from affiliate links? Does it take up a lot of your time curating the list of items? Where do you get most of your traffic from?
      - AJay17 11y ago
        99% of the income is affiliate links. I have adsense on there, but haven't really made any money on it. Finding the products is the worst part about it, i kind of restricted myself with the "under $15" theme. It sat dormant for months, but I'm going to try and get a new product up every day. As far as traffic goes, I kind of got lucky. I had an old Tumblr Blog with a domain name years ago. Tumblr used to have this program where a few people were curators for each category. This lead to a ton of followers and reblogs. They shut that program down and I've since stopped working on that blog, so I forward the domain to this new site. Still gets traffic daily. The rest is pinterest.
    - memonkey 11y ago
      Do you market it at all?
      - AJay17 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- jacalata 11y ago
  >I presume by passive income you mean any amount of money > 0 that comes in with regularity That definition would include 'a job' so it seems incomplete.
cddotdotslash 11y ago
I write eBooks for developers interested in using semi-new technologies. Previously, I wrote about developing websites to work with the Chromecast. Most recently, I published an eBook about AWS Lambda[1]. The income is not terribly good, but enough to make it worthwhile. I've been approached by publishing companies who want to raise the price to $50+ per copy, but I prefer keeping them at $2-$4 so they're more accessible for everyone. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016JOMAEE http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016JOMAEE?
- codinghabit 11y ago
  As soon as I read your post I wondered if it was the 'AWS Lambda' book that keeps showing up in my recommendations. I clicked the link and sure enough there it was! Of course, now I HAVE to buy it. :D
  - cddotdotslash 11y ago
    Haha glad it was recommended for you and hope you like it!
jo909 11y ago
What does passive mean to you? 99% hands-off income that just shows up magically without any significant work? Most schemes I see here and elsewhere require a lot of investment (of time mostly) upfront, and then often also ongoing attention so the scheme keeps working.
nsxwolf 11y ago
Sounds like it's just really, really hard to get people to hand you money. If you already have a paying job, you're way ahead of the game. Maybe the best strategy is to just look for higher paying jobs.
- stuxnet79 11y ago
  I'm slowly coming to the same conclusion. Within my circle it is fashionable to moan about the "9-5" and we spend hours having grand dreams of what it would be like to have our own thing going and earn money while we are asleep. I've started a very tiny venture right now and it is turning out to be a lot more difficult than I thought. Looking for a higher paying job (if money is what you want to optimize) is never a bad idea, regardless of whether your future plans involve entrepreneurship.
- loumf 11y ago
  You can add $x0,000 to your annual income today by just asking for it (correctly). http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
elwell 11y ago
Addons / Plugins for existing platforms that have an appropriate marketplace for this (e.g., Concrete5).
cyogee 11y ago
ThanksGiving season. I bought lots of YNAB codes (www.ynab.com) at 50% off and sold them at 25% off on eBAY. Win Win for everyone. Now they moved to cloud and didn't do any 50% off this year.
max0563 11y ago
Steam games, granted if you can get Greenlight which really isn't that hard to be honest. I have a game on there that isn't exactly the best, but it generates some beer money.
jcslzr 11y ago
I made a website with a free exercise to learn to type faster: http://www.learn-2-type.com http://www.learn-2-type.com ...sadly a lot of people are using ad blockers
- minionslave 11y ago
  I turned off my ad blocker for you site, and clicked on the ads. Hopefully you get 2 cents.
  - jcslzr 11y ago
    thanks dude, living the vida loca now
    - angry-hacker 11y ago
      Clicked on Namecheap ad because they don't stop following me despite the fact that I'm their customer. -$0.05 for Namecheap.
  - zerr 11y ago
    On the other hand, another person lost 5 (or 10) cents.
  - rrrrrraul 11y ago
    Me too, good luck!
financedfuture 11y ago
Allocate part of your wealth in riskier assets. If you think you're able to do it on your own, play around with some ETFs. Alternatively, ask around for a good hedge fund.
chad_strategic 11y ago
http://www.bestoftheinternets.com http://www.bestoftheinternets.com This worked for a while until google shutdown my adsense, becuasue I had developed auto generated content.
- chad_strategic 11y ago
  The only good news, believe it or not, it actually got me my first programming job. So I guess it was worth it.
- skynetv2 11y ago
  how ironic! Google auto generates everything and bans you for doing the same thing!!
jxm262 11y ago
Bookmarked this post and thanks for asking! My plan, which may/may-not work out - Start consulting, work like crazy to get _high quality_ clients, find common needs among them, build products from these common needs. I'm hoping I can find specific things between multiple clients that I might be able to sell as an actual product, alongside the consulting. Anyway I just started indepedent contracting on evenings/weekends about a month ago.. so far it's working quite nicely for me :)
booop 11y ago
Start a company. Hire a hardworking and dependable general manager on a salary and give him/her great autonomy. Sit back and enjoy the dividends.
- tim333 11y ago
  Bit tricky to execute. You know any real world examples where it's worked like that?
buf 11y ago
Niche website. I built Casting Call Club (https://www.castingcall.club/homepage https://www.castingcall.club/homepage) for the voice acting community. Roughly 13,000 voice actors currently use the site, but it only breaks even with all the costs associated with it, so I couldn't call it income.
- tolas 11y ago
  What have been your most successful channels for reaching voice actors?
  - buf 11y ago
    Word of mouth. I've done zero marketing, except that I was a member of various online voice acting communities, where I announced that I made the site.
- geuis 11y ago
  You're probably already aware, but if not you should share this in https://www.reddit.com/r/VoiceActing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VoiceActing/
  - buf 11y ago
    Yessir, I am, but appreciate the heads up. I love that sub.
  - buf 11y ago
    Yessir, I am, but appreciate the heads up. I love that sub.
Theodores 11y ago
Paint pictures of people's dogs. Yep, a little bit of painting is involved, but painting is fun, right? There is an inexhaustible supply of middle class people wanting pictures of their dogs painted and they are prepared to pay proper art prices for competent or in-style renditions of their dog in some picturesque scene. Since we are not dogs* and are people, poor painting is not so obvious and efforts get well received. On the back of paintings-of-dogs it is possible to also paint your own stuff. May not be entirely 'passive income' but holding a brush isn't hard and you don't have to work in an office from 9 to 5 for the man. *on the internets nobody knows you are a dog.
- beering 11y ago
  While I like painting and I like dogs, this is quite literally the opposite of "passive income".
  - Theodores 11y ago
    I have a friend who gets by on painting pictures of dogs, he also starts imbibing alcohol by mid afternoon, which is after an 11 a.m. start. He is not famous, even within the small town where he lives and paints. He also spends longer just being friends with the clients rather than doing a lot of painting, which is invariably more 'painting by numbers' as people have photos they want 'interpreted'. Really, this can be 'passive income'...!
  - tluyben2 11y ago
    Get someone to do it for you and automate the ordering and fullfilment part. Upload pic of dog, pay online, send email to painter with shipping info, painter fills online form with picture of result + tracking code upon which she gets money in the bank. Passive.
10dpd 11y ago
Borrow $1 million from a Japanese bank.
- gummywormsyum 11y ago
  You'd get a better deal borrowing from Sweden, Switzerland, or Denmark
lubujackson 11y ago
Some overarching takeaways: - niche sites with Google ads is a fading path, but still can work if you hit a good market or produce evergreen content - selling niche e-books through Amazon or direct seems to be a decent option, but is a lot of work unless you can produce quickly and have a feel for the topic - apps are dangerous because discover is nearly impossible. If you want to make apps, make quick little ones because the likelihood is that you will make $0 on any one app My personal opinion is to make niche B2B tools. There are a million little inconveniences that small businesses deal with. If you find the right niche you can charge way more than a B2C product, deal with way fewer customers and charge extra for "custom" features and things like that. The trick is to find a business problem worth solving. The best way to do this is to find someone working a job and drilling them about their work flow. It's amazing the stuff that can be automated that people still don't recognize. There is one guy who was blogging about a simple scheduling app that let 1 man operations (like barbers or chiropractors) simply text the app appointment details and it would automate putting them in the calendar. It's a great little business because scheduling is a big pain point for these tiny businesses but no one addresses it in a humane way. A good way to make $ and while also producing useful things for the world.
- vijayr 11y ago
  My personal opinion is to make niche B2B tools. How does one find what to make? That is actually a harder problem to solve than making the tool itself
  - helloguille 11y ago
    An easy way is to look for a company willing to solve a specific problem that may exists in similar companies. If you make the right contracts you can replicate the solution later.
  - infinite8s 11y ago
    It requires talking to people who have these problems ;) Most programmers only end up talking amongst themselves, or attack business problems they themselves experience (hence the large market saturation for developer tools).
nether 11y ago
Some people have successfully bought cars just to rent out via Turo (formerly RelayRides). It's not hard to make well over the monthly payment if you live near a major airport. Most insurers don't like this though and I wouldn't be surprised by an Airbnb-esque crackdown in the coming years. Until then though, it's the good times.
vijayr 11y ago
There is one person (Rob Percival - google him) who is making millions on udemy teaching people how to program. Not sure if it works for everyone, but lots of people seem to be trying. There are literally thousands and thousands of courses on udemy.
BimBimma 11y ago
I made a command generator for Minecraft. It earns somewhere between $300 - $500 $NZD per month (adsense). It's a passive income because even when I go months without working on it, I still get paid. But what I would like to know is how to make it earn about 10x more. So I can quit my main job and then just make more cool stuff for the web. I believe it's at the peak of what it can earn. Also about 25% of users have adblocker.
- geuis 11y ago
  This is for command blocks right?
  - BimBimma 11y ago
    Yes. The generated commands are long and complex and rarely fit into the chat bar. So the only place for them is in a command block.
p0la 11y ago
After reading all of this, my conclusion is: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. You may find some stuff with a more or less optimal f(risk, initial investment, running cost, return) function, but no no brainer. I wish someone had mentioned a blog a YouTube channel, I always been curious to know how much moderately successful guys are making.
- tim333 11y ago
  The nearest I've seen to a free lunch is buying property in an area that's likely to go up. Low risk of loss, high chance of retirement style profits especially if you do it more that once. Ethics so so.
  - sopooneo 11y ago
    Wouldn't the likelihood of the area going up already be built into the price?
nassirkhan 11y ago
- i've tried and failed many times at this. Finally, I started an outsourcing company 5group.co. My growth model is to get business from field partners like your self and pay them 20% of the life time of profits from that customer. For example, if someone refers a chat support outsourcing customer and the customer spends 10k usd in a year, we pay out about $1400. We manage the labor/office space etc so the is no capex like in real estate. You do need to have the savvy to generate business though. -- Prosper marketplace...lend money on prosper and receive 7-8 % - tough if you dont have capital
NetStrikeForce 11y ago
A service that people want to use :) Just started https://wormhole.network https://wormhole.network and still putting some more money and time to add an API (coming very, very soon!), but I'm pretty sure it will take off if I manage to promote it properly. The product itself is pretty awesome, probably unrivalled and the possibilities endless. I have a lot of features in the backlog and will be adding those based on user feedback. This is not fully passive, but the income is not a linear function with the invested time, which ain't bad either.
andrewsg 11y ago
I run an product (clothing, tech, home-wares) curation site [1]. It primarily uses affiliate marketing to generate an income. Lots of effort at the moment, but hopefully will pay off in time. [1] http://iwantdis.com http://iwantdis.com
meric 11y ago
I used my good income job to rent a three room bedroom apartment, and rent out 2 of the rooms. I pay < $100 a week on bills and housing, and I live in a city where the median house price is > $1m.
- morenoh149 11y ago
  is this nyc?
- infinite8s 11y ago
  That's not against your lease?
  - meric 11y ago
    I was upfront about it with the landlord. She could lease to a double income family, who're going to bargain with the rent at every opportunity, and complain about every issue that comes up that could possibly be the landlord's responsibility, with 3 kids, who with their parents working will have lots of time home alone, or she could lease to me, a mid-twenties young man, with high income and stability, and the kind of person who're generally quite chill about things, and will take the care to look after the house. Now I lease the two rooms to an immigrant, and another man who came to my city to work because he couldn't find a job where his wife and kids currently live.
    - infinite8s 11y ago
      So you basically injected yourself as a pseudo-landlord, paying yourself with a free room. Makes sense - since you are living there it would be fairly easy to turn down a family (or conversely no family would likely want to share the house with you) whereas it would be tougher for the landlord to turn down a family in preference to a group of 3 unrelated people (discrimination laws and such). It's just that typically young families present themselves as better, more stable tenants than groups of people :)
skiltz 11y ago
Built https://wholesaleorderform.com https://wholesaleorderform.com - Has 2 customers - Brings in $50 a month with zero maintenance. Still haven't even finished the homepage :) No idea how to find customers... Anyone want to partner up!
- mod 11y ago
  How'd you get your two customers? Why is your landing page so disingenuous? There's several things that are lies, given that you only have two customers. "We've gathered heaps of user feedback," "contact the onboarding team," etc. I think you need a demo.
  - skiltz 11y ago
    We have gathered heaps of feedback from the two customers, but I take your point. Landing page should be written by someone who knows what they are doing :) I had two separate unrelated customers ask for almost exactly the same system after not being able to find an existing solution that meet their needs. Thanks for replying!
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
reinhardholl 11y ago
I recently created http://filepiper.com http://filepiper.com, still busy validating the idea, then get someone to pay :) I always wonder if software products are really the way to go. Getting initial traction is seriously hard
- asteadman 11y ago
  Great Idea! At my day job we occasionally (ie: a couple times a year) need customers to send us "large" files (too large to email) and the customers do not typically themselves have enough technical ability to "host" it (be it through dropbox/google drive/etc) themselves. I spent a couple days looking for something similar a year ago and ended up with a dated product at a very expensive price. [Our web-hosting is currently sucky shared hosting we've had for decades /w a small upload limit]. I was thinking of rolling my own solution but never got around to it, glad to see somebody is working on it. PS: Assuming it works, I'd start charging right now, skip this "free for now" nonsense.
  - reinhardholl 11y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! Your use case is exactly why I started the project, I have very similar issues daily. It is definitely working. the idea behind the free for now was to entice early adopters. At the current sign up rate I will remove that in about a week or two. Thanks again for the feedback :)
jjangmes 11y ago
This is not completely passive income, but after 1 ~ 2 months of some committed work, it can become passive income. This is assuming you know what you are doing and you have experience with e-commerce. (I was losing money for the first 3 months) -Private labeling on Amazon using FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) I currently earn some passive income (~$1000/month) by selling products on Amazon. Amazon FBA is great because you just send all the products to Amazon warehouse and they will do the packaging and shipping for you. If you shipped out all the items yourself, it wouldn't be so passive. But since all my items are currently at Amazon warehouse and everything's being shipped by Amazon, I spend little time at the moment. A summarized process will be 1. Sign-up for Amazon seller account 2. Find an item to sell on Alibaba 3. Purchase the item, receive, check, and send to Amazon. 4. Perform SEO for your product page 5. Repeat 2 - 4 6. After some success, switch to Amazon Seller Merchant Pro. The most difficult part wasn't finding the right item, but rather promoting the page. Ranking my product will involve tons of keyword research, pinning everything relevant on Pinterest, and revising copy-writing. Once I start selling about 10 products/day for a single item, I'd move on to a new product. The best time to start probably is NOT at 3rd or 4th quarter. You want to have steady sales by 3rd quarter. Because if you do, you will experience some shockingly crazy sales starting November lasting until early January. If I now sell 10 units/day for product X, I was selling 100 units/day starting late November. I regret not stocking more items, but it was my first year doing this and it's a lesson learned.
- danielki 11y ago
  A few questions, if you don't mind: How do you figure out how much stock to order from Alibaba? Is it just based on the maximum financial risk you want to undertake, or something else? Do you ever replenish stock, or do you continuously rotate the items you sell? How do you pick the items to sell? Just popular items within certain categories that don't have a current Prime option? Or some other method? What % of sales end up as returns due to defective products etc? Does Amazon cover these, or do you take the financial hit if there's a refund?
  - stove 11y ago
    I have very similar questions...

327 points by nns 11y ago

Please share suggestions of whats worked for you and what hasnt

max_ 11y ago

-Build a BTC gumroad version. -AI stuff like http://predictor.ai http://predictor.ai

caipre 11y ago
Broken link?
- herbst 11y ago
  I assume he ment predicto.ai but its just a mess of text for me. Site broken, stylesheet blocked, something like this
  - zingermc 11y ago
    The problem is his SSL certificate expired last week! You can see the site if you go to https://www.predicto.ai/ https://www.predicto.ai/ and make a security exception.
- max_ 11y ago
  Try https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller
herbst 11y ago
http://i.imgur.com/RbOznIO.png http://i.imgur.com/RbOznIO.png So thats how success looks like ;)
- ovi256 11y ago
  Perfectly readable on lynx! http://imgur.com/JmZq2jt http://imgur.com/JmZq2jt
- livingparadox 11y ago
  It looks like it needs the www subdomain. http://www.predicto.ai/ http://www.predicto.ai/
  - brandoncordell 11y ago
    Still won't render correctly in Chrome.
    - max_ 11y ago
      https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller HN doesn't aloow me to edit Links after an Hour...
  - max_ 11y ago
    No it is https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller
- raverbashing 11y ago
  "Best viewed in IE 6.0"?
  - max_ 11y ago
    N0,,, best views in chrome :D https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller
- max_ 11y ago
  It needs to be on HTTPS https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller HN doesn't allow me to edit Links after an Hour...
techstrategist 11y ago
Expired SSL cert killing stylesheets on http:/predicto.ai.
livingparadox 11y ago
I think you meant http://www.predicto.ai/ http://www.predicto.ai/
- max_ 11y ago
  No i meant https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller ....Sorry
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
max_ 11y ago
Sorry for that Embarrassing broken link, The URL is actually https://predictors.ai/ https://predictors.ai/ and an example project that I recommended for the you guys was https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller https://predictors.ai/#/p/Neural_Storyteller * P.S HN should take half the blame for disabling editing after a while

SyneRyder 11y ago

There were a couple of posts with answers to this a month ago, you might find good suggestions there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10726489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10726489

33a 11y ago

Save money and invest it.

nns 11y ago
Can you give examples of what kind of low-touch reasonable-return investments you've benefited from?
- jstanley 11y ago
  Any low-fees index fund.
  - mcshicks 11y ago
    Vanguard had very low fee reit index funds. If you want to generate income it is a good option (as opposed to stock index funds) because reits are required to pay 90% of their income as dividends. You can look at all the historical dividend data on the website
    - owyn 11y ago
      I parked some money in a vanguard reit a year ago as an experiment, and to create more of a balanced portfolio. Yes, it has paid quarterly dividends but it's also down -11% in total. So as usual, it all depends...
    - Spooky23 11y ago
      They tend to be very volatile though. The VIG (Vanguard Dividend ETF) pays 2.4%. Dollar-cost average in on bad market days.
    - stcredzero 11y ago
      Is there a Bay Area REIT index fund?
  - SilasX 11y ago
    In terms of throwing off a lot of passive income, they just aren't very good though. Looking mainly at income-generating investments, the best index one might be Vanguard LifeStrategy income (with provides income and moderate capital appreciation to protect against inflation). The yield? 2.1% Nothing to write home about. [1] Is there some high-yielding, regular-income fund I should know about? Even allowing for sorta-irregular funds, you probably can't do much better in this environment, though I'd like to be proven wrong. [1] https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0723&FundIntExt=INT#tab=4 https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0723&...

taytus 11y ago

We are looking for investors...

goldenkey 11y ago
Isn't everyone looking for love...

AznHisoka 11y ago

On-demand proxies that you spin up in 1 second. I can spin out cloud servers in an instant.. but I have to wait days for my proxies to be activated.

bobby_9x 11y ago
This isn't really passive. Most people need lots of support and the servers will need to be constantly checked for abuse.
iamroot 11y ago
Can't you spin up a cloud server and install a proxy in short order?
iDemonix 11y ago
If you can spin out a cloud server in an instant, why can't you install and configure some proxy software in about 10 minutes?
hackerboos 11y ago
I SSH tunnel when I need a foreign IP.

benologist 11y ago

Amazon recently launched a new app store that pays developers by the minute in lieu of all other monetization techniques, it's great if you can come up with engaging apps. https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground

slig 11y ago
One success story of a small company on Amazon Underground - https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-money-on-android-4ada61d127ed https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-mone... TL;DR: they have a Jigsaw Puzzle Android App and make shitloads of money on Amazon Underground.
- benologist 11y ago
  That's me. I now have a Sudoku app launched too, and a new 1200 piece jigsaw to launch this month, and a word search next month.
  - swah 11y ago
    Thanks for writing that post!
wtracy 11y ago
Am I understanding correctly that Amazon is only monetizing Underground through interstitials at app launch time? If so, I'm impressed.
- benologist 11y ago
  For now yeah that's all they do, and the 'underground app' itself is tied in with your amazon.com searches advertising stuff you've been browsing.
chc4 11y ago
"it's great if you can come up with engaging apps" ...and the Amazon app marketplace has a miraculous recovery and somehow because a legitimate revenue source. It probably speaks volumes how badly their device sales are on how likely that is.

edent 11y ago

* Apps with ads in them. Easy enough to churn out, but decreasing revenues and most of the high earning adverts are the scummiest. Low value and of low moral usefulness. * Solar Panels. In the UK, the government pays you per kWh generated. Needs an upfront investment, but stable income and you reduce your own energy bills. See http://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar http://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar * Renting out property. Needs a much larger initial investment, and requires ongoing maintenance. On a good month I only hear from the managing agent once per month with details of how much rent is being paid. * Stoozing. Find a credit card with 0% interest on balance transfers. Stick the money into a savings account. Or, if you like risk, on a horse. Need a good credit rating and decent savings rate to make more than a few hundred a year though. * Affiliate marketing. If you can find a good theme (e.g. Halloween) and a decent place to put the links (somewhere that wants them - not spamming them everywhere) it's possible to get a moderate passive income. Well... not quite passive, requires upfront time commitment of selecting links and locations. * Hosting / simple websites. Again, little bit of up-front commitment. Works best if you can find a local niche of people who want a friendly face to host their websites. Usually as simple as buying a domain, setting up WordPress, and turning on automatic updates. In general, the best passive schemes require a large initial outlay and/or a dubious moral outlook. A better way to enhance your income is to eat out less, stop buying stuff you don't need, and shop around for deals. Boring but true!

Confiks 11y ago
> Solar Panels. In the UK, the government pays you per kWh generated. Needs an upfront investment (...) It also required upfront confidence in the sustainability of the government subsidy. In The Netherlands a lot of now-solar panel owners decided to invest because of subsidies, but last year the government decided to stop the subsidy for 2016. Especially with the low energy prices, that makes it a net loss for a lot of people.
- navbaker 11y ago
  Nevada just did the same thing.
- jsingleton 11y ago

shireboy 11y ago

eBooks worked for me in 2014 & 15. I am the author of an ebook Trello Dojo (https://leanpub.com/trellodojo https://leanpub.com/trellodojo). I update it periodically and earn a couple hundred dollars a month. Lots of people from all over the world tell me it has helped them, which feels like I'm doing honest, good work with it. I'm not going to retire early from just that, but really want to do a few more, and possibly expand that concept into niche sites/training/etc. niche sites and blogging have not panned out for me (yet). I feel that's more a lack of time/effort on my part. A test effort showed me my niche could work, but I just haven't committed to really getting it rolling. I'm also a software developer and have a few service type sites up my sleeve. My thinking (as yet unproven in my own life) is that relatively simple subscription services that "do one thing well" and can be marketed to businesses and government agencies can earn well with minimal ongoing investment. The trick there would be to automate as much as possible- especially support- without sacrificing quality, and periodically dedicate resources to keeping the technology current (easier said than done, I know) It's hard to balance a current "non-passive" job, family, and side passive gigs, but it _can be done_.

abatista111 11y ago

I built a education platform and plan to charge monthly once I get more students.. http://thinkacademy.io/ http://thinkacademy.io/ http://thinkacademy.io/courses/1/learn-ruby-on-rails-in-4-weeks http://thinkacademy.io/courses/1/learn-ruby-on-rails-in-4-we...

CryoLogic 11y ago

Here's my experiences for last year in passive income: Total Gross Revenues: $20,000 or so. Mostly from a single high-traffic niche site which I promote almost exclusively through social media. My site offers a free version of what a few other websites in the same niche offer as a SaaS service. From that same site, most of the revenue (~80%) is from ads (ad revenue increased when switching to responsive units). Next, Amazon associate makes up about 15% of the revenue. And about 5% from donations. The downside is that ad rates are DROPPING pretty quickly, ad-block usage rates are increasing rapidly, some browsers block ads by default now, etc. So I'm trying to get off of ad dependency. I'm thinking in the future a Patreon funded project or project with additional SaaS component will probably fare better if you traffic is at least medium size (~50k/mo+), and comprised of repeat visitors. I also have eBooks, which despite the rapid increase in popularity of Amazon authors, seem to be doing well. My most popular eBook is bringing in ~40$ / mo on the 35% plan (I can't use the 70% plan because someone stole it and uploaded it elsewhere). The rest of my eBooks are bringing in ~$20 total. If you have expertise, and strong communication skills - eBooks may be a good route to go down. Leanpub offers higher % rate, and I've seen some technical authors make a killing there - might be a better option. As far as stocks go, I'm all invested in Vanguard which seems to like tech stocks - so not so great this year. The high-dividend yield funds are probably the way to go in 2016 since growth growth isn't so hot right now. I would stay away from IoS & Android because app discovery is messed up, and you need a marketing budget in most scenarios to make it big.

nefitty 11y ago
I'm interested in your path to the free SaaS tool. Do you think it would be viable to outsource the creation of tools to compete with popular, paid ones, offer the outsourced tool for free, and rake in ad-revenue/e-book sales? With proper marketing and seo a person could probably break even within a few months. Is that anything like what you did?
- CryoLogic 11y ago
  I've never outsourced anything, because I've found that usually websites end up with a "core audience", aka maybe 100-500 people who make up the bulk of discussion, feedback, etc. I like to build relationships with these people, to better understand my audience. Plus they usually market my sites for me. It's a pretty painstakingly long process though. On the other hand, I've read about owners of tools (like ListenToYouTube, W3Counter) - who run just a tool by itself with little or no social features. If it's just the tool the audience wants, it may be totally possible to outsource the creation - and than just focus on marketing it. I'd like to see someone take a SaaS tool, outsource the development - release it for free (ad-funded or similar) and post a case study.

throwaway600613 11y ago

Peer-to-peer lending can potentially be a great source of passive income. For example, if you invested $100,000 in lower grade (C-G) notes on Lending Club with an aggregate 12.0% net annualized return, you'd receive approximately $6,000 in cash payments each month.

fweespeech 11y ago
Default rates on Lending Club are high enough you get ~33% of the quoted interest rate due to defaults.
- adenadel 11y ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong, but do you have data supporting this statement? I've been interested in peer to peer lending for awhile and this turns me off a bit.
  - twohlix_ 11y ago
    I've made 8-10% per year (defaults included) for the past 2 years on lending club. There are investment limits based on your income that you legally have to follow. I believe its 5% of your income/assets max. They don't confirm your income/assets but there are regulations related to it. It also takes work to liquidate quickly. So if not selling notes on a second market you're locked into your investments for up to 5 years.
    - MikeTV 11y ago
      Thanks for this, didn't know there was a limit. Apparently it's 10% of your net worth [0] and there are other restrictions by state [1]. Which is a shame, because it beats the pants off the stock market. [0] http://kb.lendingclub.com/investor/articles/Investor/Is-there-a-maximum-investment-amount http://kb.lendingclub.com/investor/articles/Investor/Is-ther... [1] http://kb.lendingclub.com/investor/articles/Investor/What-are-the-current-State-and-Financial-Suitability-conditions http://kb.lendingclub.com/investor/articles/Investor/What-ar...

jerguismi 11y ago

Bitcoin arbitrage.

lfx 11y ago
Correct my if I'm wrong but bitcoin arbitrage doesn't seem like good idea, here is pretty good explanation - https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-price-arbitrage-explored/ https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-price-arbitrage-expl... I would better put my money in more "real" etf's and start from there.
- joeyspn 11y ago
  > Correct my if I'm wrong... You are very wrong, plus you are talking to jerguismi (localbitcoin's founder), who I'd presume has made quite a bit from arbitrage in the space...
  - jklein11 11y ago
    The article does make a very interesting point. One which I'm hoping jerguismi could respond to. The article talks about the slow transaction time being a barrier to arbitrage. Basically, you couldn't buy in one market and sell in another market simultaneously. Wouldn't that make an arbitrage opportunity speculative? Also, because jerguismi is a founder of a bitcoin exchange, isn't it in his interest to promote trading bitcoin? I have no reason to believe that jerguismi would misrepresent his knowledge, but I think his role in the bitcoin community isn't de facto evidence that his statement is true.
    - joeyspn 11y ago
      > The article talks about the slow transaction time being a barrier to arbitrage. The article is wrong on many levels. You don't need to transact (or even own) bitcoins in order to arbitrage. You can just buy/sell and open short/long positions via the exchanges websockets API... Not WallSt speed, but a decent speed for any self-made bot vs point&click traders.

AJay17 11y ago

This was mine: http://www.thingsunder15.com http://www.thingsunder15.com

pitchups 11y ago
Looks great - is it making you any money?
- AJay17 11y ago
  Thanks! It's anywhere from $100 to $200 a month, more around Christmas time.
  - J-dawg 11y ago
    This is great! Is all of that income from affiliate links? Does it take up a lot of your time curating the list of items? Where do you get most of your traffic from?
    - AJay17 11y ago
      99% of the income is affiliate links. I have adsense on there, but haven't really made any money on it. Finding the products is the worst part about it, i kind of restricted myself with the "under $15" theme. It sat dormant for months, but I'm going to try and get a new product up every day. As far as traffic goes, I kind of got lucky. I had an old Tumblr Blog with a domain name years ago. Tumblr used to have this program where a few people were curators for each category. This lead to a ton of followers and reblogs. They shut that program down and I've since stopped working on that blog, so I forward the domain to this new site. Still gets traffic daily. The rest is pinterest.
  - memonkey 11y ago
    Do you market it at all?
    - AJay17 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jacalata 11y ago
>I presume by passive income you mean any amount of money > 0 that comes in with regularity That definition would include 'a job' so it seems incomplete.

cddotdotslash 11y ago

I write eBooks for developers interested in using semi-new technologies. Previously, I wrote about developing websites to work with the Chromecast. Most recently, I published an eBook about AWS Lambda[1]. The income is not terribly good, but enough to make it worthwhile. I've been approached by publishing companies who want to raise the price to $50+ per copy, but I prefer keeping them at $2-$4 so they're more accessible for everyone. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016JOMAEE http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016JOMAEE?

codinghabit 11y ago
As soon as I read your post I wondered if it was the 'AWS Lambda' book that keeps showing up in my recommendations. I clicked the link and sure enough there it was! Of course, now I HAVE to buy it. :D
- cddotdotslash 11y ago
  Haha glad it was recommended for you and hope you like it!

jo909 11y ago

What does passive mean to you? 99% hands-off income that just shows up magically without any significant work? Most schemes I see here and elsewhere require a lot of investment (of time mostly) upfront, and then often also ongoing attention so the scheme keeps working.

nsxwolf 11y ago

Sounds like it's just really, really hard to get people to hand you money. If you already have a paying job, you're way ahead of the game. Maybe the best strategy is to just look for higher paying jobs.

stuxnet79 11y ago
I'm slowly coming to the same conclusion. Within my circle it is fashionable to moan about the "9-5" and we spend hours having grand dreams of what it would be like to have our own thing going and earn money while we are asleep. I've started a very tiny venture right now and it is turning out to be a lot more difficult than I thought. Looking for a higher paying job (if money is what you want to optimize) is never a bad idea, regardless of whether your future plans involve entrepreneurship.
loumf 11y ago
You can add $x0,000 to your annual income today by just asking for it (correctly). http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

elwell 11y ago

Addons / Plugins for existing platforms that have an appropriate marketplace for this (e.g., Concrete5).

cyogee 11y ago

ThanksGiving season. I bought lots of YNAB codes (www.ynab.com) at 50% off and sold them at 25% off on eBAY. Win Win for everyone. Now they moved to cloud and didn't do any 50% off this year.

max0563 11y ago

Steam games, granted if you can get Greenlight which really isn't that hard to be honest. I have a game on there that isn't exactly the best, but it generates some beer money.

jcslzr 11y ago

I made a website with a free exercise to learn to type faster: http://www.learn-2-type.com http://www.learn-2-type.com ...sadly a lot of people are using ad blockers

minionslave 11y ago
I turned off my ad blocker for you site, and clicked on the ads. Hopefully you get 2 cents.
- jcslzr 11y ago
  thanks dude, living the vida loca now
  - angry-hacker 11y ago
    Clicked on Namecheap ad because they don't stop following me despite the fact that I'm their customer. -$0.05 for Namecheap.
- zerr 11y ago
  On the other hand, another person lost 5 (or 10) cents.
- rrrrrraul 11y ago
  Me too, good luck!

financedfuture 11y ago

Allocate part of your wealth in riskier assets. If you think you're able to do it on your own, play around with some ETFs. Alternatively, ask around for a good hedge fund.

chad_strategic 11y ago

http://www.bestoftheinternets.com http://www.bestoftheinternets.com This worked for a while until google shutdown my adsense, becuasue I had developed auto generated content.

chad_strategic 11y ago
The only good news, believe it or not, it actually got me my first programming job. So I guess it was worth it.
skynetv2 11y ago
how ironic! Google auto generates everything and bans you for doing the same thing!!

jxm262 11y ago

Bookmarked this post and thanks for asking! My plan, which may/may-not work out - Start consulting, work like crazy to get _high quality_ clients, find common needs among them, build products from these common needs. I'm hoping I can find specific things between multiple clients that I might be able to sell as an actual product, alongside the consulting. Anyway I just started indepedent contracting on evenings/weekends about a month ago.. so far it's working quite nicely for me :)

booop 11y ago

Start a company. Hire a hardworking and dependable general manager on a salary and give him/her great autonomy. Sit back and enjoy the dividends.

tim333 11y ago
Bit tricky to execute. You know any real world examples where it's worked like that?

buf 11y ago

Niche website. I built Casting Call Club (https://www.castingcall.club/homepage https://www.castingcall.club/homepage) for the voice acting community. Roughly 13,000 voice actors currently use the site, but it only breaks even with all the costs associated with it, so I couldn't call it income.

tolas 11y ago
What have been your most successful channels for reaching voice actors?
- buf 11y ago
  Word of mouth. I've done zero marketing, except that I was a member of various online voice acting communities, where I announced that I made the site.
geuis 11y ago
You're probably already aware, but if not you should share this in https://www.reddit.com/r/VoiceActing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VoiceActing/
- buf 11y ago
  Yessir, I am, but appreciate the heads up. I love that sub.
- buf 11y ago
  Yessir, I am, but appreciate the heads up. I love that sub.

Theodores 11y ago

Paint pictures of people's dogs. Yep, a little bit of painting is involved, but painting is fun, right? There is an inexhaustible supply of middle class people wanting pictures of their dogs painted and they are prepared to pay proper art prices for competent or in-style renditions of their dog in some picturesque scene. Since we are not dogs* and are people, poor painting is not so obvious and efforts get well received. On the back of paintings-of-dogs it is possible to also paint your own stuff. May not be entirely 'passive income' but holding a brush isn't hard and you don't have to work in an office from 9 to 5 for the man. *on the internets nobody knows you are a dog.

beering 11y ago
While I like painting and I like dogs, this is quite literally the opposite of "passive income".
- Theodores 11y ago
  I have a friend who gets by on painting pictures of dogs, he also starts imbibing alcohol by mid afternoon, which is after an 11 a.m. start. He is not famous, even within the small town where he lives and paints. He also spends longer just being friends with the clients rather than doing a lot of painting, which is invariably more 'painting by numbers' as people have photos they want 'interpreted'. Really, this can be 'passive income'...!
- tluyben2 11y ago
  Get someone to do it for you and automate the ordering and fullfilment part. Upload pic of dog, pay online, send email to painter with shipping info, painter fills online form with picture of result + tracking code upon which she gets money in the bank. Passive.

10dpd 11y ago

Borrow $1 million from a Japanese bank.

gummywormsyum 11y ago
You'd get a better deal borrowing from Sweden, Switzerland, or Denmark

lubujackson 11y ago

Some overarching takeaways: - niche sites with Google ads is a fading path, but still can work if you hit a good market or produce evergreen content - selling niche e-books through Amazon or direct seems to be a decent option, but is a lot of work unless you can produce quickly and have a feel for the topic - apps are dangerous because discover is nearly impossible. If you want to make apps, make quick little ones because the likelihood is that you will make $0 on any one app My personal opinion is to make niche B2B tools. There are a million little inconveniences that small businesses deal with. If you find the right niche you can charge way more than a B2C product, deal with way fewer customers and charge extra for "custom" features and things like that. The trick is to find a business problem worth solving. The best way to do this is to find someone working a job and drilling them about their work flow. It's amazing the stuff that can be automated that people still don't recognize. There is one guy who was blogging about a simple scheduling app that let 1 man operations (like barbers or chiropractors) simply text the app appointment details and it would automate putting them in the calendar. It's a great little business because scheduling is a big pain point for these tiny businesses but no one addresses it in a humane way. A good way to make $ and while also producing useful things for the world.

vijayr 11y ago
My personal opinion is to make niche B2B tools. How does one find what to make? That is actually a harder problem to solve than making the tool itself
- helloguille 11y ago
  An easy way is to look for a company willing to solve a specific problem that may exists in similar companies. If you make the right contracts you can replicate the solution later.
- infinite8s 11y ago
  It requires talking to people who have these problems ;) Most programmers only end up talking amongst themselves, or attack business problems they themselves experience (hence the large market saturation for developer tools).

nether 11y ago

Some people have successfully bought cars just to rent out via Turo (formerly RelayRides). It's not hard to make well over the monthly payment if you live near a major airport. Most insurers don't like this though and I wouldn't be surprised by an Airbnb-esque crackdown in the coming years. Until then though, it's the good times.

vijayr 11y ago

There is one person (Rob Percival - google him) who is making millions on udemy teaching people how to program. Not sure if it works for everyone, but lots of people seem to be trying. There are literally thousands and thousands of courses on udemy.

BimBimma 11y ago

I made a command generator for Minecraft. It earns somewhere between $300 - $500 $NZD per month (adsense). It's a passive income because even when I go months without working on it, I still get paid. But what I would like to know is how to make it earn about 10x more. So I can quit my main job and then just make more cool stuff for the web. I believe it's at the peak of what it can earn. Also about 25% of users have adblocker.

geuis 11y ago
This is for command blocks right?
- BimBimma 11y ago
  Yes. The generated commands are long and complex and rarely fit into the chat bar. So the only place for them is in a command block.

p0la 11y ago

After reading all of this, my conclusion is: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. You may find some stuff with a more or less optimal f(risk, initial investment, running cost, return) function, but no no brainer. I wish someone had mentioned a blog a YouTube channel, I always been curious to know how much moderately successful guys are making.

tim333 11y ago
The nearest I've seen to a free lunch is buying property in an area that's likely to go up. Low risk of loss, high chance of retirement style profits especially if you do it more that once. Ethics so so.
- sopooneo 11y ago
  Wouldn't the likelihood of the area going up already be built into the price?

nassirkhan 11y ago

- i've tried and failed many times at this. Finally, I started an outsourcing company 5group.co. My growth model is to get business from field partners like your self and pay them 20% of the life time of profits from that customer. For example, if someone refers a chat support outsourcing customer and the customer spends 10k usd in a year, we pay out about $1400. We manage the labor/office space etc so the is no capex like in real estate. You do need to have the savvy to generate business though. -- Prosper marketplace...lend money on prosper and receive 7-8 % - tough if you dont have capital

NetStrikeForce 11y ago

A service that people want to use :) Just started https://wormhole.network https://wormhole.network and still putting some more money and time to add an API (coming very, very soon!), but I'm pretty sure it will take off if I manage to promote it properly. The product itself is pretty awesome, probably unrivalled and the possibilities endless. I have a lot of features in the backlog and will be adding those based on user feedback. This is not fully passive, but the income is not a linear function with the invested time, which ain't bad either.

andrewsg 11y ago

I run an product (clothing, tech, home-wares) curation site [1]. It primarily uses affiliate marketing to generate an income. Lots of effort at the moment, but hopefully will pay off in time. [1] http://iwantdis.com http://iwantdis.com

meric 11y ago

I used my good income job to rent a three room bedroom apartment, and rent out 2 of the rooms. I pay < $100 a week on bills and housing, and I live in a city where the median house price is > $1m.

morenoh149 11y ago
is this nyc?
infinite8s 11y ago
That's not against your lease?
- meric 11y ago
  I was upfront about it with the landlord. She could lease to a double income family, who're going to bargain with the rent at every opportunity, and complain about every issue that comes up that could possibly be the landlord's responsibility, with 3 kids, who with their parents working will have lots of time home alone, or she could lease to me, a mid-twenties young man, with high income and stability, and the kind of person who're generally quite chill about things, and will take the care to look after the house. Now I lease the two rooms to an immigrant, and another man who came to my city to work because he couldn't find a job where his wife and kids currently live.
  - infinite8s 11y ago
    So you basically injected yourself as a pseudo-landlord, paying yourself with a free room. Makes sense - since you are living there it would be fairly easy to turn down a family (or conversely no family would likely want to share the house with you) whereas it would be tougher for the landlord to turn down a family in preference to a group of 3 unrelated people (discrimination laws and such). It's just that typically young families present themselves as better, more stable tenants than groups of people :)

skiltz 11y ago

Built https://wholesaleorderform.com https://wholesaleorderform.com - Has 2 customers - Brings in $50 a month with zero maintenance. Still haven't even finished the homepage :) No idea how to find customers... Anyone want to partner up!

mod 11y ago
How'd you get your two customers? Why is your landing page so disingenuous? There's several things that are lies, given that you only have two customers. "We've gathered heaps of user feedback," "contact the onboarding team," etc. I think you need a demo.
- skiltz 11y ago
  We have gathered heaps of feedback from the two customers, but I take your point. Landing page should be written by someone who knows what they are doing :) I had two separate unrelated customers ask for almost exactly the same system after not being able to find an existing solution that meet their needs. Thanks for replying!

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

reinhardholl 11y ago

I recently created http://filepiper.com http://filepiper.com, still busy validating the idea, then get someone to pay :) I always wonder if software products are really the way to go. Getting initial traction is seriously hard

asteadman 11y ago
Great Idea! At my day job we occasionally (ie: a couple times a year) need customers to send us "large" files (too large to email) and the customers do not typically themselves have enough technical ability to "host" it (be it through dropbox/google drive/etc) themselves. I spent a couple days looking for something similar a year ago and ended up with a dated product at a very expensive price. [Our web-hosting is currently sucky shared hosting we've had for decades /w a small upload limit]. I was thinking of rolling my own solution but never got around to it, glad to see somebody is working on it. PS: Assuming it works, I'd start charging right now, skip this "free for now" nonsense.
- reinhardholl 11y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! Your use case is exactly why I started the project, I have very similar issues daily. It is definitely working. the idea behind the free for now was to entice early adopters. At the current sign up rate I will remove that in about a week or two. Thanks again for the feedback :)

jjangmes 11y ago

This is not completely passive income, but after 1 ~ 2 months of some committed work, it can become passive income. This is assuming you know what you are doing and you have experience with e-commerce. (I was losing money for the first 3 months) -Private labeling on Amazon using FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) I currently earn some passive income (~$1000/month) by selling products on Amazon. Amazon FBA is great because you just send all the products to Amazon warehouse and they will do the packaging and shipping for you. If you shipped out all the items yourself, it wouldn't be so passive. But since all my items are currently at Amazon warehouse and everything's being shipped by Amazon, I spend little time at the moment. A summarized process will be 1. Sign-up for Amazon seller account 2. Find an item to sell on Alibaba 3. Purchase the item, receive, check, and send to Amazon. 4. Perform SEO for your product page 5. Repeat 2 - 4 6. After some success, switch to Amazon Seller Merchant Pro. The most difficult part wasn't finding the right item, but rather promoting the page. Ranking my product will involve tons of keyword research, pinning everything relevant on Pinterest, and revising copy-writing. Once I start selling about 10 products/day for a single item, I'd move on to a new product. The best time to start probably is NOT at 3rd or 4th quarter. You want to have steady sales by 3rd quarter. Because if you do, you will experience some shockingly crazy sales starting November lasting until early January. If I now sell 10 units/day for product X, I was selling 100 units/day starting late November. I regret not stocking more items, but it was my first year doing this and it's a lesson learned.

danielki 11y ago
A few questions, if you don't mind: How do you figure out how much stock to order from Alibaba? Is it just based on the maximum financial risk you want to undertake, or something else? Do you ever replenish stock, or do you continuously rotate the items you sell? How do you pick the items to sell? Just popular items within certain categories that don't have a current Prime option? Or some other method? What % of sales end up as returns due to defective products etc? Does Amazon cover these, or do you take the financial hit if there's a refund?
- stove 11y ago
  I have very similar questions...