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Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?
I do affiliate marketing. Just looking for few other options and would love to hear your experience/story of creating passive income sources !
- sharemywin 10y agoif you hire the right people anything can be a passive income.
- introvertmac 10y agoPassive income: something that makes you money while you sleep(read it somewhere). Any examples, what type of businesses you are talking about?
- JshWright 10y agoI get paid to sleep on overnight shifts, does that count?
- codegeek 10y agoNot unless you can do it from anywhere AND you are not expected to be available during overnight if the situation demands :)
- JshWright 10y agoOh I see, now we're moving the goalposts ;)
- agumonkey 10y agoWhat about "money that would get into your account even you were recently dead" ?
- pritambaral 10y agoSo ... life insurance?
- rad_post 10y agoThis is awesome!
- eonw 10y agoowning real estate that someone else manages or really owning any business that someone else fully manages for you. i know a gentleman that owns storage units up and down the north east, never steps foot in the states for years at a time. AirBNB & rentals can be hands free too, as another example,
- djrogers 10y ago> owning real estate that someone else manages or really owning any business that someone else fully manages for you If you've ever owned real estate or a business you'd know it can't be 100% passive. Even with a property manager, there are always things to fix, change, or update, and the associated decisions to make about it. One bad tenant or a property manager with bad judgement, and you're 100% back in full-time landlord mode to clean up the mess (literally or figuratively).
- eonw 10y agoyou can in fact pay agencies to deal with ALL of that, they just take it out of your cut. have you owned real estate or a business? I have both and i can attest they can be fully managed by others, without headache to the owner, its very simple. industrial RE investors do this all the time.
- djrogers 10y agoI do in fact own both, and they only run on whir own until your agent screws something up. It may require less work than other forms of income, but if you expect it to work out long term, it can never be completely passive.
- csallen 10y agoI run https://IndieHackers.com https://IndieHackers.com where I interview developers/entrepreneurs about how they make money from their apps and projects. There are tons of examples there that fit into the "passive income" category as you define it ("making something that makes you money while you sleep"). A couple of good examples from the site: - park.io (from Mike Carson) makes $125,000/mo taking domain backorders; he essentually wrote tons of scripts that buy expiring domains on behalf of his customers for $100 and that allow customers to bid against each other - Instapainting.com (from Chris Chen) makes $32,000/mo allow customers to commission artists to turn their photos into hand-made paintings; it took him years to get to this point, but it's almost all automated and he rarely has to step in Indie Hackers itself is my passive income source, although right now it takes a lot of work on a day-to-day basis. I'm writing a blog post about that that I hope to put up on my timeline (https://IndieHackers.com/timeline https://IndieHackers.com/timeline) by tomorrow. I'm doing just over $1000/mo right now, mainly from sponsors.
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- dorfsmay 10y agoYou're going to write a blog post on your site about how to make passive income, which you are doing by hosting your site about how to make passive income! I don't think it can get more meta than that!
- lloeki 10y agoNitpick: meta is too much of a catch-all, mise en abîme is more apt here.
- khedoros1 10y agoOn the other hand, people that I know actually use "meta", so it's probably a better choice if I intend to communicate information to another person. As used in the comment that you replied to, the intended meaning is unambiguous.
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- morgante 10y agoA stock portfolio that I've built through consulting profits is my main passive income source. Anything else is not really "passive." This probably isn't the answer you're looking for, but in my view the average developer is much better off simply selling their time at the maximum rate and funneling the profits into a well-managed portfolio. The median outcome for this is much better than the story on most passive-income businesses.
- wangarific 10y agoFor 100% passive, you really can't beat this. Funnel your cash into dividend stocks and now you have a stream of income that's taxed at a favorable rate too. Even if you were to go with an S&P 500 index fund you get a near 2% yield.
- bsbechtel 10y agoYes, if you don't consider the 35% corporate tax rate on the corporation's profits before the 15% capital gains.
- timetoswitch 10y agoAnd also you've taken on the risks associated with those stocks.
- GarrisonPrime 10y agoYou're assuming maximizing cashflow is the most important factor. Some of us would be willing to have a lower standard of living (possibly significantly lower) if a passive income could provide that.
- morgante 10y agoIn what way did I say that? if anything, I'm maximizing passivity. You can live off stock dividends a lot longer if you lower your standard of living. Your comment is totally orthogonal.
- xchefhatx 10y agoI have a card game business that's aimed towards women, PoCs & the lgbtq community - groups who aren't traditionally served. Every couple of weeks I ship product to an Amazon warehouse and do a bit of advertising on Facebook. It brings in around $40k/mo and 3-4x during the holiday season.
- VyseofArcadia 10y agoI've got a savings account. Interest on that baby is getting me upwards of 30 cents a month.
- k__ 10y agoI make about 50cents a month. But I hope to double it with a better investment strategy. -- edit -- I just looked at my depot and it seems like I made about 4€ last month. Well, guess retirement is near :)
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- luhn 10y agoI know you're being facetious and your real-life investment portfolio likely looks much different but I need to say: Savings accounts are a terrible place to put your savings. If you have anything more than a couple thousand dollars, you can put it in a mutual fund and see several percent return on average, versus the fraction of the percent you can get from a savings account. In certain situations savings accounts can be advantageous—They are very low-risk and the money is immediately available. But for a long-term investment, almost anything is better than a savings account.
- rockdiesel 10y ago> versus the fraction of the percent you can get from a savings account Ally savings account is 1%. It's where I keep my emergency fund now. Once I built up my emergency fund I stopped putting money into it, however, but it's nice to see some noticeable interest gains every month vs. the pennies I would see with my Chase savings acct.
- AznHisoka 10y agobut they do help you sleep at night. the market can drop 5% in a day and not many people can stomach that emotionally.
- andrei512 10y agoI run https://www.weheartswift.com/ https://www.weheartswift.com/ the first site dedicated to the Swift Programming language. I've wrote a book that teaches people how to code in swift from the ground up. https://www.weheartswift.com/swift-programming-scratch-100-exercises/ https://www.weheartswift.com/swift-programming-scratch-100-e... I've also made an exercise platform similar to codeschool/codecademy/etc that is available as a mac app using playgrounds or online by using our swift sandbox https://www.weheartswift.com/swift-sandbox/ https://www.weheartswift.com/swift-sandbox/ The site generates about 30k/year in revenue growing at a steady pace. Operating costs are around 10k / year for servers/software/subscriptions/marketing. I need to spend about 2 weeks yearly updating the book/app to the last version of swift. I also spend about 5 minutes per day replying to customer emails. It's not that passive, but really close. (ignoring time spent developing products/book)
- deegles 10y agoAny advice on writing a technical book? I'm thinking of writing one on developing for Alexa.
- andrei512 10y agoactually teaching the content to people helped me the most. gitbook is awesome and free. https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook blog a lot and start making a list of subscribers yesterday.
- jefflinwood 10y agoI still get royalties from programming books I wrote about ten years ago - the content has been updated by other authors in the mean time, and the corresponding royalty split has declined, but I don't do anything active either. On the not-quite-as-passive side, I have an iPad game that I had basically left out in the Apple App Store for several years, where it sold with no involvement or investment on my end. Only recently, Apple required all app developers to resubmit their older apps or face delisting - in my case, it involved updating cocos-2d to support the latest ARM architectures, and making a whole lot of changes for everything that had happened in iOS in the past couple of years. I also run a small API-as-a-service, which runs on reliable infrastructure, and doesn't take much real work to monitor and/or run.
- abrookewood 10y agoWhat type of programming book did you write that is still relevant 10 years ago? Presumably something not tied to a specific language or technology?
- mjibson 10y agoI run https://www.goread.io/ https://www.goread.io/ which is a subscription-based RSS reader. It's open source and runs on google app engine. It costs ~$2k per year to run and I make between $2k and $3k profit per year for nearly zero effort. Stripe handles payments and app engine keeps the servers running. I consider it a high success because for the amount of marketing I've done in the last 2 years (exactly zero), it still has paying users. If I did a few months of code improvements and marketing pushes I could probably increase that income a few times.
- ShaneCurran 10y agoHi Matt, love the site. Do you mind me asking what brings the running costs up to $2k per year?
- mjibson 10y agoIn 2015 I paid app engine about $1700 or ~$130/month or a bit over $4/day. I could probably get that down another dollar or so a day if I did some optimization and cleanup work, but I haven't cared.
- drinchev 10y agoHmm just as a side-question. Do you consider the time developing this product as a part of the "expenses" sheet? I'm asking because I did some side-gigs in the past and I always end up having a product ( aff.links ) that pays the server and some pennies above, but if I count the time lost on developing it, I will be on severe loss for decades.
- mjibson 10y agoI did not count my own time, no. If I did I'd almost certainly be below profitable. But I was doing it at the time because I wanted a google reader replacement, not to make money. I only started charging because I had so many users (at the time, most are gone now) that it was costing me above $50 per day, which adds up quick.
- wattt 10y ago
- atemerev 10y agoI run a few high frequency trading algorithms on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. These are research-grade and not scalable (I already make 20-30% of trading volume on some exchanges), however, it still brings me around $200 per month.
- blahshaw 10y agoTarget retirement date funds, a handful of individual stocks for entertainment purposes. I also have dabbled with Lending Club (annualized ROI went from 15% to less than 5% recently) and the money saved on interest in paying back my student loans early.
- protomok 10y agoPortfolio of index funds based on http://canadiancouchpotato.com http://canadiancouchpotato.com 25% TSX (Canadian market) 25% S&P500 (US market) 25% MSCI EAFE (Developed market excluding Canada/US) 25% Fixed Income - cash,bonds,'high' interest savings account, etc. Requires about 4-5 hours of time once per year to rebalance portfolio and update some partially automated Google Docs files to track performance. Works for me...also planning to get a rental property at some point.
- patrickgordon 10y agoIf you don't mind answering, how long have you been doing this for and roughly how has your rate of return been?
- pesfandiar 10y agoI've been following an older Canadian Couch Potato portfolio for a few years now. The market has been mostly growing since 2010 so it probably doesn't count, but it's been returning an average of 7-8% every year (dividend+gain). Even last year, when the Canadian economy didn't do well, its return was positive. It takes more than 4-5 hours a year for me though. I invest a part of my income every month. It makes sense since I don't pay any commission on purchases, so YMMV. More info: http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2015/05/01/how-i-invest-my-savings http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2015/05/01/how-i-invest-my-sa...
- patrickgordon 10y agoThanks for the info. It is appreciated!!
- shanecleveland 10y agoSmall tools and web apps that provide a quick solution to very niche problems. Mostly aimed at business. Primarily based on obscure forms that occasionally need to be filled out for shipping. If I find myself googling something but don't find a great fit for what I need or many relevant hits, I look into building it. Or if I find myself manually gathering and formatting data or info, I see if I can automate it. Some end up being useful/found by others. Some don't. I currently see about $300/mo through adsense. A few of these things could turn into something more if I was ever motivated to do so, but would no longer be passive. Some probably not. Most interesting is seeing what takes off and what doesn't and trying to apply that to duplicate the success. I've tried a couple affiliate projects, but have not found a great fit yet.
- badpixel 10y agoA small portfolio, some adsense on a blog, a game on the play store. By all their powers combined here comes 70$ a year.
- whiplashoo 10y agoI run https://mapchart.net https://mapchart.net which is a map chart creation tool. You can quickly create a map chart of World, USA, UK, Europe and more with custom colors and descriptions. It is completely free to use and my only source of income are Adsense ads on the homepage and some sparse donations. Since May, when the site was featured on the front page of Reddit, my audience has increased with a steady rate, along with my ad revenue (almost $500 last month). I don't really do anything maintenance-wise, except for answering questions from my users. I work on it from time to time, mainly adding new features or new country/regions maps, and I still enjoy it, as it was my first real programming project (I actually submitted it as a final project for EdX's CS50x course!).
- shanecleveland 10y agoGreat example. How long have you been running it? How did you get on the front page of Reddit?
- whiplashoo 10y agoI started it on December 2014, with a pretty ugly interface and only three maps available (World, USA and Europe). I already had some success on Reddit, where I created interesting map charts with it (like religiosity by US state, most popular browser by country,etc.) and shared the link to the site in the comment. This got me many users that would either come directly from the Reddit post or see another map somewhere and google my site. The big spike came last May, when I shared it on /r/InternetIsBeautiful (https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/4jcadt/make_your_own_custom_map_of_world_europe_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/4jcadt...) , which is a specific subreddit for internet tools and single-purpose website, and it propelled to the front page.
- shanecleveland 10y agoAwesome. I love your "dogfooding" marketing strategy. Very smart.
- Mc_Big_G 10y ago$2/day on a simple ios/android app. Now I just need 1000 more apps.
- mkoryak 10y agoI make about 30 bucks per months on a single ad on my jquery plugin docsite[1]. I lose about 25 bucks per months on website for artists that I built over the course of a few years in my spare time[2] [1]http://mkoryak.github.io/floatThead/ http://mkoryak.github.io/floatThead/ [2]http://exhibitionnest.com http://exhibitionnest.com
- ehynds 10y agoAbout $300/mo on an app that provides real-time train tracking for Boston's commuter rail. Thankfully for me the MBTA is a mess, so each system meltdown (which happens about once a week) causes a spike in downloads.
- Veratyr 10y agoI'm invested in forex (foreign currency trading). There are 3 buckets I'm in: - $3500 deposited, run since Jun 3 (~5 months), current balance is $5200 (48% total profit, 8%/mo). - $5000 deposited, run since Jun 28 (~4 months), current balance is $4590 (8% total loss, ~-2%/mo). - $3000 deposited, run since Sep 2 (~2 months), current balance is $3218 (7% total profit, ~3.5%/mo). It's certainly not for everyone but it's an amusing hobby. I've made a net profit so far so I'm happy. I came to this after stocks as the research I'd found seemed to show that foreign currency fluctuations were significantly easier to predict (and profit from).
- tom_wilde 10y agodid you apply Deep Learning / ML techniques here? ;)
- ArturT 10y agoWhat do you think about http://sidekiq.org http://sidekiq.org gem approach where you have free open source tool and paid pro version. I did similar thing with my open source gem knapsack for test suite parallelisation in ruby. I run pro version at https://knapsackpro.com https://knapsackpro.com
- mperham 10y agoI hope it's working out for you! I'd love to hear how things are going if you want to email me privately.
- shaunpud 10y agoI launched https://askdns.com https://askdns.com a few months back and making around ~AU$75/mo just from Adsense. There are around ~3M links in G now so the traffic coming in is slowly increasing.
- swapneeld14 10y agoIf I may ask where do you get updated data to search for domains?
- bkrull 10y agoI run BitPixels (http://www.bitpixels.com http://www.bitpixels.com) that provides automated website thumbnails. I purchased Bitpixels from another HN member a few years ago and have continued to build and market it. BitPixels currently makes ~$1k/month which is enough to cover the App Engine and DigitalOcean bills plus a bit extra. I'm working to find 1-2 more marketing channels that can drive sustainable growth.
- dizrupt 10y agoNot 100% sure how this works or what it does. Can you explain?
- bkrull 10y agoDefinitely, so imagine if HN decided to show a thumbnail image beside every link on the front page so users get a preview of what they'll see before clicking the link. When looking for a solution HN will quickly discover that auto generating website thumbnails is a nontrivial challenge to do well. BitPixels solves this challenge by providing a simple img tag HTML code that HN would use to automatically generate and cache a png thumbnail of any URL. Behind the scenes, BitPixels uses a server farm of real Google Chrome browsers to load URLs and take screenshots so the thumbnails look exactly like the real website. Most competitors use open source libraries like phantomjs or cutycapt that produce inaccurate thumbnails on modern websites.
- jackgolding 10y agoYou should chat to the indiehackers guy, sounds like you could help eachother out!
- DanHulton 10y agoI created http://www.ipaidthemost.com http://www.ipaidthemost.com over a year ago, and I can proudly say it's earned enough to buy a couple coffees. Well, if you ignore hosting. And the few times I dropped $50 onto it to try to advertise it. It's odd. Most people who see it think it's clever and neat, and a few will buy, but when advertised, people bounce right off.
- sundarurfriend 10y agoSuggestion: since it's a vanity-based project, allowing people to add a photo - either through gravatar, or via an upload - would probably increase conversion. Also, the actual paid-for message being in such tiny text is pretty odd given that's the (user-side) purpose of the site. And that part is somehow the hardest to read part of the page for me, perhaps because of the double background (image + black background) interaction. IMO, it's a lot of such small nudges that's reducing the effectiveness of the site.
- pramit 10y agoI sell books at https://www.thesuccessmanual.in https://www.thesuccessmanual.in
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- quicksilver03 10y agoI wrote a book to help boostrapped startups choose the best hosting solution: https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com/ https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com/ Promoting the book has been the major issue for me, which is probably why it hasn't sold as much as I would have wanted.
- thesmileyone 10y agoIf it is actually good (ie, you stand by it, proudly!) then put it on Amazon KDP and link to that high up before your landing page (which is your website it appears). You can even drive traffic right to it, ie from FB ads to the amazon link... and if you have positive reviews then it should sell if you target the right people. And drop the price also in line with the rest.
- dejv 10y agoI do run http://notationtraining.com http://notationtraining.com not the biggest source of money (~ 200 USD/month), but it keep earning money for six years in row, so I am happy about it. Other then that: rental property, p2p loans portfolio (~ 6% pa) and small stock portfolio (around 5% pa).
- sideproject 10y agoI've been developing a tool that lets you create your own HackerNews. Then it grew to a SaaS that lets you create, manage and grow an online community. http://www.hellobox.co http://www.hellobox.co
- usgroup 10y agoOdd how few seem to mention property (real estate)? Even those alleging actual returns worth a damn on stock portfolios. Surely the most obvious route on the planet is property. For two reasons: 1. It's leveraged. I.e. a bank will usually give you a 4:1 loan (mortgage) to buy property. Interest will usually be close to the central bank rate, so it's about as cheap as a loan gets, especially right now. If you then rent the property you are receiving a monthly return on the leveraged sum having only invested the deposit... 2. Property is an appreciating asset (US,UK,China,FR,etc). It's a systemic matter in many countries because it ties in a large part of an individuals net worth and retirement expectations. Your 200k leveraged with a mortgage will net you more than most stock portfolios unless either you're Renaissance Capital or you just like a gamble.
- usgroup 10y agoTo put this another way. It's really not difficult to find mom & pop who made 300k on a small property portfolio with no special skills because of systemic capital appreciation, a liquid rental market and leverage(loan/mortgage). You'd struggle to find such a high success rate in any other asset class.
- Rainymood 10y ago>Property is an appreciating asset Isn't this the cause of the housing bubble? If everyone thinks this? Why wouldn't profits be driven out if everyone thinks like this? Simply curious.
- usgroup 10y agoOver-valuation causes bubbles as opposed to appreciating assets. E.g. the common wisdom says equity is a generally appreciating asset class because the expected return over a long horizon is positive. Similar is true of property except that no-one will give you a 40 year loan of 400k for peanuts to go trade the S&P.
- mofeeta 10y agoAre you willing to field some questions via email?
- jdc0589 10y agoabsolutely nothing. Turns out its pretty hard to monetize open source developer tools. Really wish there was other stuff I enjoyed working on in my free time. If anyone wants to start paying me for the JsFormat sublime plugin, let me know, I'll gladly take your money.
- ddgflorida 10y agoI created http://convertcsv.com http://convertcsv.com and make about $750 a month off google ads. I also have one affiliate link but it isn't producing much. I spend a few hours a week answering emails, and another 2-10 hours a month working on enhancements. As a developer I work with data a lot, and noticed the lack of tools for converting delimited data - so I created my own tools online.
- introvertmac 10y agoHow did you spread the word in early days of your project?(Any platform in particluar helped or performed better for marketing?)
- ddgflorida 10y agoNo marketing, all traffic came from search engines. I focused on SEO from the start and that helped with the rankings. I also made sure my site was more functional than the competition. 100% client-side code.
- shanecleveland 10y agoHow long have you been running the site? A long, slow ramp-up, I assume? Were you ahead of the competition timeline-wise? Most of the good ideas I think I have end up being fairly saturated, which is discouraging! Well done. I now have your html tag remover on the reformattext.com bookmarked for a current project. Thank you.
- ddgflorida 10y agoRight - The site has been running over 3 years now. There wasn't much competition at first but in the last year I've had real competition plus a bunch of copycats, some who actually copied my code and changed the front-end.
- wangzhebi 10y ago3-4k per month. I own a rental property doing nightly rentals. I've automated all of the notifications, door code programming, arranging cleaning, etc.
- panorama 10y agoI do peer to peer lending on an internet forum, VAs handle most of the work, ~$1k/mo passive, ~$3k/mo when active (but it's been passive for the past several months). I can try to answer what I can, but I can't divulge much more because it's not at all a defensible revenue model, and anyone with access to capital can do it.
- tones411 10y agoI have made several small mobile apps. (http://anthonytietjen.blogspot.com/p/my-portfolio.html http://anthonytietjen.blogspot.com/p/my-portfolio.html) I charge for some of them, but my White Screen Flashlight has ads. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anthonytietjen.whitescreenflashlight&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anthonytie...) If you are into programming, and are considering an app, make something super simple (like my Cost Per Sq Foot Calculator), and you might be surprised that people actually pay for it.
- marktangotango 10y agoHa I tried this (trivial app, get paid) and no one paid!
- tones411 10y agoWas your app for iOS, or Android?