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Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

• Tharkun 10y ago
  My passive income has mostly dried up this year. Years ago I built an automated webshop deployment system for a bloke who makes hundreds of small websites a year, and dozens of webshops a year. The deal was that I'd build it for free, but I'd get a fee per shop he deployed. This worked out pretty well for a couple of years, but now he's swimming in money and is retiring, and my passive income source has dried up. Of course, because of my laziness, I took the passiveness too far and it's now all but impossible to reuse it for another potential client. It was fun while it lasted.
  • kriro 10y ago
    You could take over for the guy if you want to turn it into active income. Since he's retiring and made some good money off the cooperation with you he probably wouldn't mind setting you up with some clients and sharing some of his methods. Can't hurt to ask (if you want to go that route)
  • countryqt30 10y ago
    What kind of shops were these? Can you give some examples, please? Where those his OWN shops?
• tove 10y ago
  My passive income is quite standard. Three apartments in a new block. I bought all of them four years ago when the construction was still unfinished. This got me a good price. I knew that the area would be under continuous development, therefore it won't be hard to find renters. I was right. Best part is that I didn't even have to furnish them. I managed to rent them all unfurnished.
  • Dowwie 10y ago
    In what country are you located? Furniture is more of a short term rental requirement, unless you've included essential appliances with your categorization.
    • tove 10y ago
      Germany (Frankfurt). I didn't provide the appliances, except for fridge and electric oven+stove (because I managed to get a discount on buying three sets of these appliances through a friend). Sorry, also the kitchens were furnished by me. The rentals were made long term.
    • ninjaroar 10y ago
      That is true in the US, even in NYC. However, furnished apartments are the norm in London, for long rentals.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • sean_patel 10y ago
    > My passive income is quite standard. Three apartments in a new block. I bought all of them four years ago when the construction was still unfinished. Trust fund baby? You make it sound easy. How much cash did you have to front for the down payment total? I know that for Investment properties, Lenders require a minimum of 25% - 35% cash down (so they can hedge their risks against you dumping a badly performing investment property.) The barriers to entry in Real Estate investing (as rental properties) is almost always the HUGE down payment.
• Murkin 10y ago
  A self published book on "Redux". Still in progress but already sold for 3,160$ in revenue between me and a friend. Hope to have it really pickup once done and turn profitable https://leanpub.com/redux-book https://leanpub.com/redux-book
  • yonibot 10y ago
    Nice to hear :)
  • billconan 10y ago
    why did you choose this leanpub platform? I like the fact it can publish unfinished book. but I'm worried that it is not as big as amazon?
    • Murkin 10y ago
      Its a great place to build and edit the book. The pre-release is a good market validation bonus. Once its done we will publish on Amazon as well (no exclusivity at leanpub)
      • billconan 10y ago
        Are you worried about piracy? Because leanpub allows paid user to download pdf and epub files. those can be easily shared. whereas, on amazon, you probably could only distribute the work via kindle and printed (I'm not sure), without providing any shareable files?
        • Murkin 10y ago
          You can't escape piracy if you offer epub.. just hope enough people appreciate enough to buy.
        • DanBC 10y ago
          It's very easy to pirate Kindle files.
        • 10y ago
• myroon5 10y ago
  Using Lendingrobot - an automated p2p lending service
  • siong1987 10y ago
    isn't that funded?
    • refulgentis 10y ago
      Yeah, grandparent is spam: https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/lending-robot-makes-lending-club-investing-easy-as-setting-screen-brightness/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/lending-robot-makes-lendin...
      • myroon5 10y ago
        I am not involved with the company other than being a happy customer. It was by far the best passive income I made this year.
        • logicallee 10y ago
          I think you're using the actual definition of passive income (make an investment, don't do anything else other than wait), whereas everyone else seems to be talking about fake-passive income, such as lifestyle businesses they pretend not to work on. (But really do.)
    • myroon5 10y ago
      Yes I believe it is.
    • elproxy 10y ago
      I assume GP meant interests generated from lending on that platform.
  • codecamper 10y ago
    I used lending robot. I used the middle of their risky / safe bet slider, tending toward the conservative side. I'm going to end up LOSING MONEY as many of LC's loans are going delinquent. Joy.
• Nilzor 10y ago
  This is my portfolio : http://www.nilsenlabs.com http://www.nilsenlabs.com None of them have made a lot of money, but one is still generating a small amount. Guess which. Hint: Income is not proportional with the shinyness of the technology stack
  • cmadan 10y ago
    GogTasks? It seems to solve a real problem.
    • OJFord 10y ago
      I'd go with GetOut Ølbarometer - I think you're underestimating the European desire for cheap beer!
  • daveguy 10y ago
    Flags and capital quiz, 10k downloads. Little competition. I would say gogtasks for user need, but there's a lot of competition in that space.
• tomschlick 10y ago
  ZoneWatcher - Side project of mine to monitor your/your clients' DNS services and alert when a change to a zone has been made. It serves as a revision history & alerting system which has been helpful when a client fucks with their DNS and expects you to put Humpty Dumpty back together quickly. I launched it a few months ago and have a few smaller subscribers with a handful of larger subscribers. https://zonewatcher.com https://zonewatcher.com
  • chipperyman573 10y ago
    I really like the theme you used! What's it called?
    • tomschlick 10y ago
      The marketing portion uses Pivot: https://themeforest.net/item/pivot-multipurpose-html-with-page-builder/8748103?ref=trs21219 https://themeforest.net/item/pivot-multipurpose-html-with-pa...
• austenallred 10y ago
  I co-wrote a book on user acquisition and co-created an accompanying video course to climb out of debt left over from a failed startup. Made $104,000 in revenue since June (turns out the user acquisition stuff actually works), about 87k of which is profit, so we'll say ~$11,000/month part-time. It still makes me a solid $2,000/month now with zero work, and hopefully more once the book is officially published. (It's done and delivered to backers, but won't be on bookshelves and Amazon until after it's typeset.) https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-ultimate-growth-hacking-guide-secret-sauce-marketing--2/x/14399717#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-ultimate-growth-hacki... I know the marketing will be over-the-top for HN. Just know it sells because the content is really, really good.
  • sigi45 10y ago
    Yeah thats exactly what you should do to promote something like this. Tell anyone how much you made with your own tipps without proof/proof of your specific case and use it to sell it
    • rjtobin 10y ago
      Well, looks like it got $103k in crowd funding, so it's not totally unsubstantiated.
    • coldtea 10y ago
      What part of "$103,892 USD total funds raised" on the provided link was difficult to parse? And why assume the other is lying? This Ask HN is specifically about passive income, and calls for people to share their profits. It's not about them posting their IRS returns or other proof. If you're gonna doubt them, might as well skip the whole post.
      • sigi45 10y ago
        It is the same crap Tim Ferriss is doing. People like the idea, think they can use it as well only to never understand that they are a part of a pyramid scheme which is ultra flat and has only him or someone like Tim Ferriss on top.
• bootloop 10y ago
  Unfortunately not 2016, but two years ago when the Samsung Gear Watch came out a friend of mine got it right away. We went out drinking the same day and when we came back at night we put together a watch face while still being drunk. We uploaded it, set the lowest possible price 1$, and... Nothing happened. Everywhere in the admin panel it showed 0. 0 downloads, not a single dime earned, even after a few days. We were devastated. But than I found another tab in the utterly shitty admin panel and it hit me like a rock. The numbers on the dashboard were a monthly overview and in fact we earned already hundreds of dollars and downloads in just a few days. I went back to the computer, but together an even better watch face, set it to 1$ again and watched it selling like hotcakes. However it tried out quite quickly after that. People started to copy stuff and giving it away for free and I never bought the watch myself, I just used the emulator to test my apps. So I took them out of the store at the end because dealing with taxes and sharing the income does not make it worth it if you get support requests like "how can I change the time on my watch", "what do I care, its your shitty watch and Samsung's shitty interface"... So yea. That's my best story about unexpected passive income. Selling stuff fast on a new platform seem to work! Edit: Found some screens. First one: https://i.imgur.com/TIVsPKO.png https://i.imgur.com/TIVsPKO.png Best selling one: https://i.imgur.com/9L8TetO.png https://i.imgur.com/9L8TetO.png
  • dorfsmay 10y ago
    You created an apps in a few hours while drunk, set the price to the lowest possible, and when you thought you had no sale after a few days, you were "devastated"?
    • bootloop 10y ago
      Look. We were very emotional at the point. We thought the binary clock was a good design and the booze helped us to believe we were going to get very rich of it. ;-)
      • tomcam 10y ago
        Love the honesty of your answer!
• jrheard 10y ago
  Young hackers who have a surplus of income and have funds to spare that aren't being channeled toward debt / family / donations, heed me: save as much of your salary as you can, and put it in boring investments (index funds / etc), probably through vanguard.com (no affiliation, I just use them and have heard nothing but good things from people I trust). You can pretty easily set up your job's direct-deposit system so that a portion of your salary goes directly into your investments without you ever seeing it, it's a good set-it-and-forget-it system. It adds up over time! [Somewhat related: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim... ]
  • yonibot 10y ago
    This book taught me the fundamentals of passive investing (https://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/0393330338 https://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/03933...) and this website is THE online community for Bogle-style, passive investors (https://www.bogleheads.org/ https://www.bogleheads.org/), once you understand the basics.
    • hackerboos 10y ago
      I read that book this year. The entire book can be summarised as. Don't attempt to beat the market. The market cannot be beat (many examples in the book). Invest in index funds long term which is the right mix of risk/reward for most people. It does have a chart in the back which tracks your age and situation. For example as you approach retirement you should start to liquidate your funds and buy government bonds so you aren't hit by a bad year when you have to start drawing on your investments. It did convince me. I opened accounts with Wealthsimple and Questrade the next day. A great site for fellow Canadians is http://canadiancouchpotato.com/ http://canadiancouchpotato.com/ - you can skip the book.
      • late2part 10y ago
        Why did you choose Wealthsimple and Questrade instead of Vanguard like a lot of people on bogleheads recommend?
• buf 10y ago
  https://www.castingcall.club https://www.castingcall.club Social network for amateur voice actors. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/@buf/accidentally-built-a-successful-social-network-now-what-23aa237665d2 https://medium.com/@buf/accidentally-built-a-successful-soci... Brings in about $2k/mo. p2p lending is hit or miss for me: 3-10% Index funds pull in the rest. I've also moved temporarily to a very cheap COL country so that I can focus on some more side projects to pull in extra sources of income before I return to the work force.
  • wfunction 10y ago
    Question: how do index funds (or any kind of stock, really... in fact this question isn't really about index funds) "pull in the rest"? Do you actually manage to sell them when they're high and buy when they're low again? Or do you get stocks with dividends and just make money using the dividends? Obviously merely possessing stock of high value is kind of moot if it doesn't turn into cash somehow, so I'm curious how people usually do this. (I don't know much/anything about finance.)
    • buf 10y ago
      Sorry for the confusion. It's just a set it and forget it robo investment for now. I go in and adjust every quarter.
      • wfunction 10y ago
        Ah, so no actual income then? Just stocks going up in value? As in, at some point you'd have to sell before you actually have any income from it, right?
        • bdowling 10y ago
          If you sell you pay taxes on the gains, so you are probably better off borrowing against your investments if you need cash, since borrowing isn't a realization event for tax purposes. Investments that pay dividends aren't as good for individuals since the dividends are taxes at ordinary rates.
• IAmEveryone 10y ago
  210,000 Euro, divided between me and a friend. We started a small online shop about 10 years ago, and it's mostly automated. About 5 minutes/day + one week / year of work. Before that, I had spent a few years (trying to) run rather big software projects (for me – I was 18 or 19). They had cost me so many sleepless nights that I swore to never again take on customers paying me more than 100 Euro each. Now, if anybody complains, or gets on my nerves, they get their money back and are never heard from again. My friends joke I'm the living example for an unconditional basic income. They haven't decided on the outcome yet, though.
  • raphinou 10y ago
    Could you share more details? Was it hard to get it right? Did you need luck to get it to that level? Is it a niche?
  • siscia 10y ago
    WHat you sell?
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • blockchan 10y ago
    I assume you don't sell physical products, then? Is it something you created by yourself?
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • ommunist 10y ago
    mescaline?
• grecy 10y ago
  I wrote my first e-book [1] about how to save money to work less and live your dreams. I'm really happy for a first attempt, and it has inspired me to write more. [1] http://amzn.to/2hcfuB7 http://amzn.to/2hcfuB7 - Work Less to Live Your Dreams
  • toymachine 10y ago
    Wow, that's awesome. How are you promoting/marketing it? How do people find out about it? And how are you getting reviews? Have been thinking about this for awhile and haven't settled on the right topic yet!
    • grecy 10y ago
      Thanks! Marketing has mostly been on my website[1] and social[2]. I'm getting reviews from people interested in what I'm doing, sites that cover Overland Travel, 4x4, etc. (I'm driving around Africa for the next 2 years) [1] theroadchoseme.com [2] @theroadchoseme on FB/Instagram/YouTube
• frou_dh 10y ago
  2 (count 'em) dollars a month. For letting two people who don't want to run an instance of my OSS program themselves tap into my personal instance.
  • foota 10y ago
    One. Two. I counted them.
    • futuravenir 10y ago
      I followed your lead and also counted them...But just in my head.
• herbst 10y ago
  I have a website with ads on it. Or actually a few, but one that mostly pays for my life right now.
  • metaprinter 10y ago
    I have one website with ads on it, been running it for like 6 years, generates a whopping $200 yr...
    • herbst 10y ago
      My main site makes between $1000 and $1500/month. Most of my other sites are more on $50 - $200/year too :/
  • hellofunk 10y ago
    What kind of site is it?
    • herbst 10y ago
      Gaming related. Its just content actually, but also user generated content (what is what makes it passive)
  • tinbucket 10y ago
    I'd be really interested in learning from you about what you did with this site and the less successful ones.
    • herbst 10y ago
      What i did? Well when i have a idea that i think somebody else could like too i throw it into a website, then throw it out there and see what people think. Sometimes i get valuable feedback and can improve, sometimes it is good as it is. The only "secret" other than user generated content (what makes it actually passive) for me is to never stop trying. I have like 50 in use domains right now, many which i did not extend because they did not pay for themself after a year.
• vladdanilov 10y ago
  Optimage – a visually lossless image optimization tool http://getoptimage.com http://getoptimage.com Released this week. Came unnoticed on HN but somehow got featured on PH. 1200+ downloads of free version and a few sales. Not sure if that'll change. In that case, the best of 2016 will be one of the plugins for Sketch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319286.
  • Romajashi 10y ago
    what's PH?
    • bertjk 10y ago
      Product Hunt
    • disillusioned 10y ago
      https://www.producthunt.com/ https://www.producthunt.com/
    • nonsince 10y ago
      Pornhub
      • Infinitesimus 10y ago
        To be fair porn sites do need all the video/image optimization they can get due to the sheer amount of data they hold
        • brettz 10y ago
          Yes, Pornhub uses a mix of JPEGmini and our own image optimization.
          • vladdanilov 10y ago
            Ahem… are you fully satisfied with your current solution?
• fratlas 10y ago
  Trump game! Not huge amount, but for the small amount of the effort it was great.
  • Romajashi 10y ago
    What is Trump game?
    • funnyfacts365 10y ago
      A game with Donald Trump as the character, most likely.
      • OJFord 10y ago
        Two years ago, the first response would surely have been "Top Trump cards, most likely", most likely. Perhaps it's Trump Trumps? If not, it should be. Or presidential candidate trumps; Trump trumps all?
• refrigerator 10y ago
  My brother and I have built a couple of test prep sites for UK medical school entrance exams: https://www.bmat.ninja https://www.bmat.ninja, https://www.ukcat.ninja https://www.ukcat.ninja . BMAT Ninja made about $25k this year (up from $16k last year) and UKCAT about $10k. Didn't do any work on marketing really so it is pretty much passive, but I think with a bit of work they could both do a lot better. It's a very seasonal market - we only get customers for about 3 months per year (the 3 months leading up to the exams), so thinking of branching out into other exams that occur during other times of the year so the income is a bit more steady.
  • abutler 10y ago
    Looks good! What did you use to build this?
    • refrigerator 10y ago
      Thanks :) Nothing special really - Laravel on the backend, Bootstrap on the frontend. And React for the interactive question bank interface (probably not necessary but I wanted to learn it...)
  • harperlee 10y ago
    How did you get the question bank? Did you pay students for questions? If so, how did the costs balance the profits?
    • refrigerator 10y ago
      We paid freelancers from around the world (via www.upwork.com) to write the questions based on some guidelines we made (it's not really hard to write questions of this level so anyone can do it with a bit of guidance) and then paid medical students to write the solutions. Probably spent about $7k on this stuff back when it started, so it did require a bit of upfront cost.
  • biznerd 10y ago
    great site! if you didnt do any marketing, how did your customers find you?
• rachelandrew 10y ago
  I put my CSS Layout knowledge into an online course at: https://thecssworkshop.com/ https://thecssworkshop.com/ Interestingly it has been very popular with teams (so selling a set of licenses so a whole team of developers can use the material). I also teach the same material in person (either in-house or in open workshops) so I'm keeping the two in sync. I made some notes about that process on my blog: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/06/03/creating-an-epub-for-workshop-notes/ https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/06/03/creating-an-e... I intend to do a bit more marketing of both the in-person and online training in the new year. As an independent (not working for a browser vendor) invited expert to the CSS Working Group, training and offering this course is really how I can fund doing that.
  • philippnagel 10y ago
    Would you be willing to sell the code powering the website itself?
    • rachelandrew 10y ago
      It's built using my other product Perch Runway, using our Shop add-on :) took me about half a day to put together as Shop deals with membership stuff by default. https://grabaperch.com https://grabaperch.com https://shop.perchcms.com https://shop.perchcms.com
      • philippnagel 10y ago
        Awesome, thank you, will look into it! I am currently putting together an online course and I am still undecided on the easiest method of delivery.
• snadal 10y ago
  Some years ago, I did some referral promotion for a webhosting company with nice results, around 70k. Later, company rules changed and I stopped actively promoting it, but second level referrals still are generating 5-10k year with doing absolutely nothing of work.
• antr 10y ago
  In early 2016 I purchased commercial real estate, got a 25 year fixed rate mortgage, and leased it. This requires very little of my time every month, and the post-tax yield is above 5%. I couldn't be happier. I'm now considering doing this again in 2017. Hopefully interest rates will remain as low as they have been in order to lock-in an attractive mortgage.
  • chipperyman573 10y ago
    As the property owner, aren't you responsible for maintenance etc?
    • antr 10y ago
      Contractually, day-to-day maintenance, no. Any extraordinary maintenance (a water pipeline bursts, electrical problems, etc), yes; but that would be covered and taken care of by the insurance company.
    • kornholi 10y ago
      In the commercial world, NNN (triple net) leases are popular. The tenants take care of property taxes, insurance, and maintenance, so it is a good passive investment since you don't have to worry about operating expenses.
  • PaulRobinson 10y ago
    You don't say where you are based, but you are going to get a shock if you think interest rates are going to stay on the floor. If you can get a genuine 25-year fixed rate, great, but you need to tread carefully here. Brexit, Trump, EU sentiment, China trying to deal with their own problems, they're all pointing to the same way: devalued currencies. Where they start, rising interest start to follow. I'd also be wary of assuming commercial real estate was a lock-in. I've heard horror stories. I'm glad it's working for you right now, I'm just saying: make sure you tread carefully and have done your research before you start gearing up.
    • lowpro 10y ago
• dejv 10y ago
  I do have portfolio of small web apps: tools for learning music notes, non-latin alphabets, language flash cards and so forth. They are making some nice money each year, but the trend is quite clear: given same traffic I am making about 50% less each year. Ad revenue is way down (more adblock users, less money per click, CTR is down), but paid premium plans are balancing it a bit. These projects are still my biggest passive income stream, but they are going to die in few years. Other than that I am owning agriculture land (that I am renting), rental property and portfolio of p2p loans. Those traditional assets are much more expensive to acquire, but then the yield is much predictable and stable. Still, the tech projects are my best source of income considering the amount of money/time required to create it.
  • formula_ninguna 10y ago
    that's because of "programming is fun, it's easy, let's do more programming, let's teach everyone how to do programming, yyyaaahhhh"
  • Havoc 10y ago
    How are the p2p loans doing?
    • dejv 10y ago
      They are doing good. My strategy is to invest very conservatively and for relatively short time. I am making about 7% pa.
      • Havoc 10y ago
        That's pretty impressive. I was under the impression that its near break-even. Which site are you using if I may ask? And what is your idea of short time in this context?
        • dejv 10y ago
          I am from Czech Republic and I am using quite a new platform called Zonky. What I see is that quality of loans go down as a platform scale and I am lucky to be with this platform from the start. So my cohort is made up of mostly early adopters. I am year in my portfolio with 0 defaulted loans and 1 late payment (I feel like this loan will default during the lifetime). My strategy is to invest to nonconsumer debt (no car loans, no holiday or Christmas presents loans or loan refinancing). I am investing in loans with disclosed profession (investing in IT professionals, govt workers, school teachers...) and with disclosed loan history (aiming to people with 0 debt). I want the loans to be paid in 3 or 4 years. I do break my rules for about 5% of portfolio that goes to riskier loans, this is where I get majority of my yield, otherwise my yield would be like 4 or 5% instead of 7 - 8%. I guess this strategy is not applicable in US or UK, where is normal to have some debt (there is/was very different debt culture in most EU), and even here is still harder to discover these good loans, so I basically stopped investing in there. Next year I want to start experimenting with b2b loans for unpaid invoices (business sell their new invoices with terms like NET30 or NET90 to boost their cashflow).
• scolvin 10y ago
  Helpmanual.io is my first attempt at passive income. Launched 6 weeks ago and traffic is building nicely. There's still a fair bit to do but the delight of sites like this is you can make improvements when you want. Shame that ad income is less than it used to be but we'll see how it gets on. https://helpmanual.io https://helpmanual.io
  • soft_dev_person 10y ago
    That's nifty and cute. How do you go about promoting and building traffic for this kind of site?
    • OJFord 10y ago
      > How do you go about promoting and building traffic for this kind of site? Well, parent posted it here and got you interested!
      • scolvin 10y ago
        Well yes, a bit of that. :-) I'm kind of relying on Google to list it organically as man pages are something people search for a lot.
  • erikb 10y ago
    It seems to be a searchable man page index. What does it offer that google+terminal don't offer?
    • OJFord 10y ago
      > What does it offer that google+terminal don't offer? Hyperlinks and the "referenced by" section are pretty neat.
    • scolvin 10y ago
      Man pages in the terminal are pretty annoying as you can't (easily) search them. By "Google" I presume you mean online indexes of man pages E.g. This site. The other man pages sites are ugly, old and incomplete, despite that done of them rank pretty high on Alexa. I built this site to end up smarter, more modern, easier to use and more complete. Still a work in progress atm.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
  • Cenk 10y ago
    What are your WordPress Plugins?
    • csomar 10y ago
      Mainly: https://wpadpress.com/ https://wpadpress.com/
  • karolisram 10y ago
    Would you consider your trades luck that won't last? Also I am curious what's your background that made you so successful in trading? I personally had 10x gains on crypto market but it was a 1 year investment, (no speculations) done with some research but I'd say I mostly just got lucky.
    • csomar 10y ago
      I'd say paying a very expensive tuition to learn trading and patience. But on the holding department (buy and hold), you are delusional if you don't think that luck doesn't play the major part of it.
• panorama 10y ago
  I wrote an ebook that helps Junior Developers get jobs - it's primarily targeted at bootcamp grads: https://kokev.in/hired-fast https://kokev.in/hired-fast In the past 8-10 months, it made about $5k+ through sales as well as partnerships with a couple online bootcamps. Not too shabby as I spent almost no time marketing it. Plus it was fun to write since I'm passionate about the topic and I've received some awesome feedback (of the "you actually changed my life"-sort). That was more than worth the hundreds of hours I spent writing it, the small bit of money aside.
• cesarb 10y ago
  Here in Brazil we have it easy. The most boring funds (the ones which track the interbank rate - CDI) easily return around 12% per year (depending on the administration fee; the smaller the administration fee, the higher the return). With the inflation around 6% per year, this gives around 6% returns before tax. If you stay with the fund for at least two years (and it's of the correct kind), the tax rate is 15% over the gains, so you have an after-tax return of around 5% per year above inflation. And that's for a fund which basically never gives negative returns. You can go further and buy government bonds directly, through the Tesouro Direto system. Those indexed by the SELIC rate (which is sort of related to the CDI) are currently around 13.5% per year, before administration fees and taxes (in fact, the boring funds I mentioned above mostly invest in these SELIC-indexed government bonds). This will change when (and if) rates get lower, but so far, investing in these funds or bonds is the simplest (and one of the best) way to have passive income.
  • ukoki 10y ago
    12% sounds great but that's about how much the BRL has decreased against the dollar over the last five years. Just holding USD cash would have gotten you about the same returns. https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USDBRL:CUR https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USDBRL:CUR
    • cesarb 10y ago
      In my experience, holding actual physical USD cash is a bad investment; older bills are worth less (exchanges will give you something like 10%-30% less for older bills, if they are accepted at all), so the longer you hold it, the less it's worth. On the other hand, there are funds which track the USD; see for instance http://www.bb.com.br/docs/pub/siteEsp/dtvm/dwn/inf04128893.pdf http://www.bb.com.br/docs/pub/siteEsp/dtvm/dwn/inf04128893.p... . That fund had a return of 150% in the last 5 years; however, it had a return of -12.58% this year. The CDI had a return of only 64% in the last 5 years, but that's a consistent return, with no negative months. This year the CDI had a return of 12%, so if you had in January invested in a fund which tracks the CDI, you'd be way ahead of someone who invested in a fund which tracks the USD. In other words: yes, investing in USD has a higher return, but that return also comes with a higher risk. I don't buy food with USD, I buy food with BRL, so the BRL is the one that matters here.
• vyoming 10y ago
  I have launched https://drilldb.com https://drilldb.com couple of months ago, got few paying users and growing each month.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• 2throwaway2000 10y ago
  I make $1,400/mo from Google AdSense. I made a Wordpress website for people who want to find information about other people. I don't do anything on the site anymore besides perform Wordpress updates. It's basically changed my whole life and I am very fortunate/lucky. Throwaway account.
  • jmzwar 10y ago
    Congratulations - that is great to hear. Is the traffic mainly from google?
    • 2throwaway2000 10y ago
      85% Google
  • ivrrimum 10y ago
    link?
  • georgiecasey 10y ago
    what kind of traffic and CPMs you getting? i assume most of the traffic from organic search?
    • 2throwaway2000 10y ago
      About 10k visits/mo
  • jdcarluccio 10y ago
    What's the website?
• bert2002 10y ago
  The best was a physical project - www.spypatch.com. A sticker for the camera on your laptop. I dont do any advertisement, but it sells through Amazon and the website. ~2k/y.
  • soft_dev_person 10y ago
    Clever. Friendly correction: peace of mind, not piece of mind =)
• weichsel 10y ago
  I added an animated GIF exporter to my lossless screen recorder Claquette (macOS, https://www.peakstep.com/claquette https://www.peakstep.com/claquette). The project got some traction when Apple featured me in the Mac App Store this August. It also entered the Product Hunt front page and finished in the top 3 on launch day. Revenue is nothing spectacular, but it's a nice additional income.
• neals 10y ago
  I build a small CMS / CRM + app as a freelancer, for a client. This was 6 years ago. I build it for almost nothing, because it's a really simple thing that took a week or two. I agreed to automated billing with him and he pays per user. I also build API's so he can hire other developers to do stuff with the data and add features. I myself haven't touched the code for years, but the growth of the database means an extra monthly $1250-ish comes in. Which is nice.
• timbowhite 10y ago
  TLD List - https://tld-list.com https://tld-list.com It's a price comparison website for top-level domains. Gross on average is $600/month through affiliate sales and data download subscriptions. Requires maybe 10-20 hours of work per month for maintenance and new features. The most difficult part is tracking registrar affiliate earnings, and then actually getting paid by the registrar. Many require you to manually request a payout once you've reached the minimum payout threshold, others simply ignore your payout requests.
  • tscs37 10y ago
    I love you. This is what I needed in my life.
  • archon810 10y ago
    I don't know if I'd call 20 hours passive income.
• georgiecasey 10y ago
  an android app that pulls in about €500 a month. i coded it years ago and literally have not thought about it this year until now. it used to bring in about €700-€800 a month but i finally got some competition after a few years. i've noticed the app game is tightening up
  • djadmin 10y ago
    and what is the app about? Any link to share?
• ThomPete 10y ago
  My side project http://www.ghostnoteapp.com http://www.ghostnoteapp.com is still growing. It's a tricky product because the way the app work is not for everyone, at the same time when people use it they normally share it with their friends. So I get good organic traffic. The biggest issue is to explain whats unique about this productivity tool, but seeing the video normally do the job. It's not able to pay for me not working yet as I live in NY so there are obvious reasons for that being hard. But it does provide me with a healthy chunk of money. And through feedback from customers I have found a new product in the same area and that will be a SaaS product.
• elcapitan 10y ago
  Being a developer in a large corporation.
  • kodisha 10y ago
    Gotta appreciate sarcasm in this answer, take a [+]
    • le-mark 10y ago
      Note it's not necessarily sarcasm. Personally, I've been working as a developer for years (15+), and I 'quit' a couple of years ago. What do I mean by 'quit'? I've been working in large corporation bouncing from team to team. I only write code if I absolutely have to. So in practice I end up actually "working" a few days a month. I don't do shit at work. I just deliver something every so often, and with my experience, I can do as much as a typical dev in 1/10 the time. And I can do the hard stuff some developers just can't. An example of this was writing a parser for third party lua config files. The team fought a half assed implement for months, I came in and re-did it in a week. Agile has been a god send for me. I just complete a couple of tickets a week, enough to have something to report in the stand up. So far as management is concerned I'm golden.
      • hypercluster 10y ago
        But what do you do instead? Hours must seem long without work!
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
        • sitkack 10y ago
          The mind can playback any movie idea you can think of, even some you probably can't.
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
• wordpressdev 10y ago
  Maintaining a few websites, ranging from a gift ideas website based on (and earning from) Amazon, to some content sites, latest being www.americaundertrump.com
• sepharoth 10y ago
  Made a med school entrance exam prep platform with my brother last year (www.bmat.ninja) - $12k profit last year, $27k this year. Once the website was setup, maintenance workload was pretty minimal (the occasional BugSnag report), so I guess that counts as passive.
• sdfjkl 10y ago
  Amazon referrals. I made £40 or so.
• ommunist 10y ago
  rent from real estate
  • branchless 10y ago
    Rentier.
• DictumMortuum 10y ago
  I am the person behind http://dictummortuum.blogspot.com http://dictummortuum.blogspot.com I reach the adsense threshold about once every year, so it's ~70 euro/year. Sad, but I don't spend a lot of time maintaining it.
• joemanaco 10y ago
  I'm making between $3'000 and $10'000 Dollars with native apps/games and html5 games. I made much much more a few years ago but app store revenue is decreasing each month and all my latest apps made me nearly nothing. (My portfolio: http://intermediaware.com http://intermediaware.com).
  • lj3 10y ago
    Do you advertise or do any marketing, or are you dependent only on app store searches and word of mouth?
    • joemanaco 10y ago
      I've done press releases here and there but never put money in advertising or stuff like that.
  • vatotemking 10y ago
    This is something ive been meaning to get into. Any tutorials, sites, or books to recommend?
    • joemanaco 10y ago
      Watch Handmade Hero from Casey Muratori.
  • ejanus 10y ago
    I would like to get into games, any pointers(books, article, ides, and so on).
    • joemanaco 10y ago
      Watch Handmade Hero from Casey Muratori.
  • cableshaft 10y ago
    I used to make native apps/games and some web games, and I was wanting to start making small games again, but I keep hearing how revenue has dropped precipitously for them and it makes me worried. As someone who's experiencing the drop in revenue firsthand, what are you thinking of doing to address that? Shift platforms to PC/Steam? Change the designs of future games to reflect current trends, etc.? I was considering I might just make games using a simple cross-platform tool like Love2D, keep the designs of the games small but addictive, single player only, no levels but can be played endlessly to failure (i.e. Tetris or 2048), either make them free with a simple consumable or a dollar, and distribute them on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. I don't expect to make a ton of money for most of them but I hope I'll get lucky with one of them and it becomes a hit. I have about 3 past web games to port and update that could work. Does this seem feasible? What would you do differently?
• andersthue 10y ago
  Still my 5 year old watermarking tool making around 3-5k$ a month. My only new product this year was a 6 weeks video course [1] in productivity, it makes around $5000 every time I fill a class. 1. http://timeblock.com http://timeblock.com TimeBlock course
  • omegote 10y ago
    What's that watermarking tool of yours?
    • nthState 10y ago
      Maybe it's: https://www.watermark-image.com/download.aspx https://www.watermark-image.com/download.aspx
• dbg31415 10y ago
  Surprised nobody has mentioned getting married yet. Dual incomes is probably the easiest path to wealth. Just don't ever get divorced...
  • mf2hd 10y ago
    It's too risky, not worth it :)
  • branchless 10y ago
    Heaven 17: I'm your money. Buy this Sign here Order now our emotional life I'm offering you the post of wife Plus the overnight treasury It'll work for you if it works for me --- It's a great song and a very good album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0-x3GbFxgE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0-x3GbFxgE
  • saddestcatever 10y ago
    Being married is not exactly a passive activity :P
• branchless 10y ago
  Passive income. So great that financiers gave people a nice name for extorsion. Some ideas on here are creating value and selling it over time. No problem with that. Too many are rentier activity, costing everyone more in the long run. Appropriating wealth rather than creating it. Hacker news seems to embrace this culture. Surely the antithesis of the early days of computing and the origin of hacker culture.
  • dgacmu 10y ago
    What a strange attitude. I'm very grateful that my landlord chooses to own an apartment and rent it to me on a short-term basis. I needed housing for four months, I already own a house (which is being remodeled), and I certainly didn't want to try to buy a second house for five months. For that rental, I'm happy to let my landlord earn a profit, in exchange for taking on the risk of owning and maintaining the property.
    • eevilspock 10y ago
      Not strange at all. Many well-respected people have this point of view, from Nobel laureate economists to free-market libertarians. The problem is that most of the profit he "earns" is from the ownership of land, not from maintaining the property. See my other comment for more, or this now on the HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153047
      • dgacmu 10y ago
        The profit he earns is because he's providing a service that I need -- short-term housing. To do that, he's taking on various risks associated with homeownership, such as a lack of available tenants and fluctuations in capital due to market conditions. Some of the issues discussed on the linked post aren't fundamental to the idea of profiting from what you own, they're examples of something closer to monopoly abuse -- buying out all of the available properties in an area, etc. It's not great when there's not enough property available for outright sale, but it's also not great when there's no room available for short-term housing either. The linked article has several issues with it, though I won't disagree with the problem of using regulation to lock-in a high-profit monopoly. That's a bad thing, and it's common, and it's something we should fix. But some claims in there -- "A professor at an architecture school or law school does not earn a six figure salary due to providing superior mentoring and teaching. They earn their money because they are the legal gate keepers to entering licensed occupations." -- are baloney. The earn that salary because that's what it takes to pay them to not go make substantially more money in practice, and the university carefully calculates that minimum to keep their professors at minimum cost. (This one I do have specific knowledge of - I'm a professor who just spent the year in industry, and the degree by which my salary increased during that year was... large. That's not specific to computer science, either; I know a lot of law professors who're in a nearly identical situation. They do the job because they love teaching, and the university is happy to give them a pay cut in exchange for that.)
• soft_dev_person 10y ago
  I made some silly fan designs on CafePress many years ago. Haven't really touched it since then, but it still generates $50 per year. Provisions have been going down. though. That being said, it's mostly 2 designs out of ~35 that sells anything at all. I'm sure there's some potential in there, but it's kind of hit and miss.
• limedaring 10y ago
  I wrote Hello Web App and Hello Web App: Intermediate Concepts (http://hellowebapp.com http://hellowebapp.com, they're learn-to-build-a-web-app books using Django) and self-published both in 2015. Just checked and this year I've made about $13,000 in profit. It's mostly passive — this year I started using a fulfillment company so the majority of my work is sending them orders (and answering questions about the book.) Hoping to continue the trend next year by launching a book on teaching design for engineers (http://hellowebdesignbook.com http://hellowebdesignbook.com).
  • finspin 10y ago
    Congratulations! How did you promote the books? What would you say was your most effective promotion channel?
    • limedaring 10y ago
      Through the Django and Python community, primarily -- they've been super supportive. The second book was aimed at folks who've completed the DjangoGirl's tutorial.
  • jtcond13 10y ago
    This is a great product. Glad to see it doing well.
    • limedaring 10y ago
      Thanks for the compliment!
  • e12e 10y ago
    I'd be curious to hear a rough estimate on how much work went into those books, and the site? I'm assuming "13k in profit" means sans expenses for proof reading, hosting etc - but not counting the actual work writing everything? I also find it satisfying to see that it's apparently quite possible to make (some) money on such projects - keep up the good work! :-)
• inovica 10y ago
  I run a number of side projects and have done since the mid 1990's. I started in business when I was 21 and I'm now 47, so definitely considered 'old' to some of you on here! I've been o reader of HN since it came out, but rarely a contributor. A few comments from me and a link to some of what I've done and how they have done in 2016: - Rich Dad, Poor Dad got me into the idea of 'passive' income. Nothing is truly passive of course, but it makes me think about what I do - SourceGuardian. This is encryption software I set up in 2002 as I had a need myself and the nearest product was $6000 at the time. It has generated a great passive income since then. Enough to pay all my bills. 2016 was no different. I work with 2 other people on it, one of whom I've never met (he's in Russia) and it works well - Competitor Monitor. This used to be a side-project 5 years ago, but it has grown significantly and in the past year we are up by 35% and we have grown our team. Strangely this has now become passive in the sense that I have created a structure and systemised the business (read The Emyth Revisited book) and that has allowed me to step out. I am not more of an investor than a day-to-day contributor - UKscrap.com. This one died in 2016. The site is still there, but competition and my lack of interest killed it As I said, nothing is truly passive, but you need to have a passion for whatever you do and I would try to create a 'passive index' for your ideas. How much time will they take to get off the ground, how much to run monthly, what is the product life cycle (if you can work that out!). From when I started there are a HUGE number of resources to help you also. Feel free to ask for help or advice, for what it's worth! EDIT: I actually met my SourceGuardian partner once in Prague for 2 days. Forgot that when I wrote the above!
  • wvlia5 10y ago
    Hi! I would like to know the language and LOC of both SourceGuardian and Competitor Monitor, to see the what's the complexity of code people are selling. Thanks
    • inovica 10y ago
      Both are relatively complex now and I don't have a precise answer for 'lines of code' for you. Competitor Monitor has evolved for 5-6 years and has various subsystems including image matching, crawling, proxy management and much more. Both started out as MVP's and have evolved. Competitor Monitor is built in Python and Go predominantly, however that shouldn't mean anything. The language, platform and complexity of someone elses product should not be any guide for you on your own. Looks also like you created a throw-away account purely to write the request
• alkonaut 10y ago
  Money in the bank, made me well over $100 over the whole year. adjusts monocle
  • abledon 10y ago
    slow clap
• 77yy77yy 10y ago
  Domain sales, over US$ 2M/yr that could have been mid 7 figures easily but still holding onto those other gems. With all the new extensions valuable .com domains is where it is. Brokers managing sales. Also not sure if falls into passive or not, sold a business few years ago and did the financing, still getting paid monthly for few more years.
  • branchless 10y ago
    Twenty first century rentiers!
  • countryqt30 10y ago
    Which were those domains sold?
  • gremlinsinc 10y ago
    I have a decent 5 letter one, zvive.com (zuhvive like survive w/ a z) I'm still trying to figure out a startup to launch on it, but i think it could be a good brandable one.. I wanted to do an online survival store, etc... Do you think I could get some money for it on the market?
• estomagordo 10y ago
  2016 isn't over. Ask in 3 weeks time.
• pilom 10y ago
  I work remotely and moved into an RV to travel around North America with my wife. Started blogging about travel and working on the road at http://therecklesschoice.com http://therecklesschoice.com and using Amazon affiliate links whenever appropriate that pull in about $50/month.
  • brianwawok 10y ago
    This seems not passive. If you blog 5 hours a month and make $50, you made $10 an hour.
    • sdfjkl 10y ago
      It is if you like to blog anyways.
      • pilom 10y ago
        Yeah we were doing it anyway to keep our family in the loop about where we were and how it worked. Honestly it's probably way less that $10/hour, but we do it for the travel log anyway.
      • brianwawok 10y ago
        So if you like to program, programming is passive income? I don't think that's how it works.
    • xchaotic 10y ago
      True, but no income is truly passive. I think you also have to consider the savings of not having to own a house (or being able to rent out an existing one) so it's as good as any other 'passive' strategy posted here.
      • brianwawok 10y ago
        I think stock market is passive income. Literally 5 minutes to set up an account, and it can provide income for life without touching it. I consider that 5 minutes small enough to not count, but not sure what the hard limit is ;) If you make an iPhone game.. spend 1000 hours.. then it makes you a few $100 per year for a few years, I don't think thats passive income. It is just income that is very delayed from when the work was done for it.
• codecamper 10y ago
  I want to be able to invest in solar projects. These projects often have internal rates of return of 10%+. However, this involves 20 or 30 year contracts to buy power from you after you have made the initial investment to purchase /rent land and install the panels. Wish there were a way to securitize those deals & allow us to trade them like bonds.
  • durkie 10y ago
    Solar City used to (and night still) offer solar bonds that were exactly this. The future of these is a bit uncertain after their Tesla merger though. It sounds like they might be changing strategies
  • burkemw3 10y ago
    Look at solar yield cos, the well structured ones just own the revenue stream
    • codecamper 10y ago
      trouble with the solar yield cos is they have these "sponsors" But those guys are just PV manufacturers who are looking to boost their margins by installing PV and then charging their yieldco top dollar for those projects. It's an obvious conflict of interest. I've got some PEGI, which is mostly wind power that has less of this conflict of interest. However, I'd much prefer to simply invest directly in a solar project via a notes (lending club) sort of mechanism. Allow me to sell the notes on an aftermarket if I suddenly need money for another reason.
• kaa2102 10y ago
  Web and email hosting. Designed sites in 2015, hosted on Google Cloud and continued to take in monthly web and email hosting income in 2016.
• pmorici 10y ago
  I design & build adapters for old server power supplies that make it super easy to reuse them as general purpose 12 volt power supplies.
• vital101 10y ago
  Many years ago when I was still a PHP + Wordpress developer, I discovered that getting updates to private plugins and themes was a huge pain. Fast-forward a few years and I finally built out https://kernl.us https://kernl.us as a learning project (Mongo, Node.js, Angular). It's mostly passive income now, pulling in ~$450 per month.
• caseysoftware 10y ago
  Previously, as a developer evangelist with Twilio, I had to know the tech events and tech leaders in my local community. While I didn't figure out a repeatable approach then, in late 2015, it hit me. I built a bot network that reads tech events - mostly meetups, some conferences and workshops - for a given city from a variety of sources and tweets them. I use machine learning to determine hashtags, time of day to tweet, and new data sources. When I launched Austin - https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents - in September 2015, I got 900 followers the first month. I suspected it was a fluke so launched Dallas FW and Houston to test. It wasn't a fluke. In 2016, I've launched 45 different cities in the US and the network has 100k followers collectively, has its own automated weekly mailing list, and is generating 1.4M+ impressions/month. Revenue is affiliate fees for conferences (we are a media partner for O'Reilly) and workshops and selling the ad blocks in the newsletter. Almost all of that is automated. The revenue is pretty minor right now but growing and I spend 1-2 hours on it a week. The landing page is here: https://techeventsnetwork.com/ https://techeventsnetwork.com/ (only some of the cities) and the full list of cities is here: https://twitter.com/TechEventsNet/following https://twitter.com/TechEventsNet/following
  • caseysoftware 10y ago
    Btw, by plugging into meetups first, I found a super receptive audience. After a decade+ of planning UGs, I knew the most important but easily forgotten step is promoting the group. The Tech Events Network tweets most groups either the morning of or night before and five days in advance, so you have a couple chances to notice. Further, occasionally it mentions the meetup group's twitter handle so easy RTing. (All automated and sometimes I'm surprised about what it's found.)
  • avinassh 10y ago
    > I use machine learning to determine hashtags, time of day to tweet, and new data sources. can you elaborate more this?
    • caseysoftware 10y ago
      Sure. My last startup - Clarify.io - did automatic speech recognition through machine learning. Since I was doing the roadmap and API design, I wanted a better understanding of ML and started digging into it. For context, I started by studying the Austin tech community since that's what I know and could manually check the conclusions. The basics: Overall, the system tracks 5500+ groups, conferences, etc which is close to 60k events. It grows as it discovers new groups and events via a few channels. As it finds and imports groups and then events, it categorizes each based on how they're described. If it's from Meetup.com, the category data and topic are reasonably good so it starts with that. If the source is Eventbrite, less so. If the source is an event website, even harder. After ~15 months, it's discovered about 105k keywords/phrases, some only barely related. Of those, only about 7500 are actually useful. Not surprisingly, they include languages, frameworks, companies, products and combinations of words. (Side note: I've found words like "hacking" are less of an indicator now than when I started.. because everyone is "hacking" something.. marketing, cooking, etc.) From all that, groups are qualified in/out based on their overall score. I manually review things that are borderline but that's 2-3 most weeks. That keyword/phrase list also feeds into the hashtags that get used. The first version of this - hardcoded, no ML - was hacked together in a day. I've rebuilt it from the ground up to wire in the ML processing to scale across all the cities. I later did some major refactoring to have pluggable output so it can broadcast into a Slack channel (done & released) and eventually send you a reminder DM or text (via Twilio!)
• thewhitetulip 10y ago
  After being encouraged by folks on HN I published my tutorial on writing webapps with Go without a framework, http://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook http://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook There isn't much income because I want the book to be free, I'm writing another tutorial migrating the same app taught in the book to use VueJS library.
  • tomcam 10y ago
    Why not publish (at a typical ebook price) on Amazon also? Be a fun experiment to have both paid and free versions--not too many opportunities to collect that kind of data. Or maybe make the vue version available only on Amazon while leaving the older version as is.
    • thewhitetulip 10y ago
      It is an interesting proposition, but I do not know why, I feel to give out my book for free, the reason for this might be from the fact that I learned programming on my own reading free books, the great books came with a hefty price tag, hence I don't feel it morally right to publish my book/tutorial at a hefty $$. Said tutorial/book since people have told me that if it isn't present in actual stores it can't be called a book :) Also, my first book/tutorial is available via leanpub.com, so users can pay if they want, so far hardly 10 have paid, but gitbooks.com where the online version is hosted does get around 200 page views daily + 800 downloads monthly. Leanpub currently has 550+ readers.
      • tomcam 10y ago
        I deeply admire your motives. Am not trying to remove that pleasure from your life, but I will say that very often people who pay tend to appreciate and value one's work product more than if it's free. Thanks for the thoughtful answer.
        • thewhitetulip 10y ago
          Thank you! Yes, I do understand that folly regarding money. Money tends to bend reality, there are many psychological experiments done with money, for instance: spending physical money induces more pain than spending money using a card, that's why it is recommended to carry cash around the next time we do shopping (read this in a book Thinking Fast and Slow and observed in real life) I know you aren't trying to remove that pleasure from my life! But the thing is, after open sourcing my tutorial, it has been read thousands of times, and there have been 4-5 readers who went out of their way and communicated to me how much they loved the book and in the words of one reader on HN, "it is one of the best tutorials I have read" regarding webapps in Go. It is a humbling experience for me to hear this from someone else (who isn't my best friend :D) It is a great irony that while documentation is free, books are not. Plus, I am not an author, writing tutorials/books isn't my primary source of income, although I was thinking of keeping the Vue book/tutorial open source on github, it already is, http://github.com/thewhitetulip/intro-to-vuejs/ http://github.com/thewhitetulip/intro-to-vuejs/ and charging money for the PDF, most probably I won't be doing that, let's see. Thanks for your input!
• buckhx 10y ago
  $AMD + $ARRY
  • alimbada 10y ago
    I'm relatively new to investing and started a year ago. $AMD was one of the companies I chose to invest in last December. I'm up 100+% (in GBP) on my AMD investment right now and planning to hold for another year. If Zen and Vega deliver (and I think they will) I'm confident I'll see 200% a gain in the next 6 months, possibly even close to 300%.
• averageweather 10y ago
  http://www.averageweather.io http://www.averageweather.io Only have made like $20 off Adsense, but I've got a lot more work to try and get this tool into passive mode: * working on selecting a date range * style up the site a bit more * maybe have users so you can save searches etc I get very valuable data that the travel industry would probably consider great leads, but I'm just figuring out what to do with it all. Edit - and fill out these graphs: http://www.averageweather.io/monthly/boston/ma/12/ http://www.averageweather.io/monthly/boston/ma/12/
  • libria 10y ago
    Nice. Some wants: * If I type Manhattan, NY, automatically show me a map w/ overlay of weather in Manhattan and surrounding areas. Maybe default to today, but also forward cursor to calendar. * Or maybe automatically show bar chart of Manhattan for 1 week starting today. If they select a day automatically show +-3 days. * or allow a date range to be selected or even just Month of December * you need exposure, I've never heard of this before edit: Oh ok, you've already done some of these, good. 1 more: move the C/F selector to upper right and make it a sticky value per visitor
    • averageweather 10y ago
      Thank you. Any tips on exposure?
      • libria 10y ago
        Myself no, let's hope someone with more expertise answers. At a guess I'd say it would be difficult to buy ads to get exposure to then sell ad clicks. Cheapest way would be very high SEO placement, but you don't have much content for indexers to anchor on. Maybe add features like expand out travel/local things-to-do space? Good domain name though. Join relevant forums (travel, weather) and be active and genuinely helpful and leave website in signature.
      • tomcam 10y ago
        Mention it on city-data.com or Reddit local subreddits. Test this strategy by doing only the biggest population centers.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• yeahdef 10y ago
  http://dollarfuckyou.com/ http://dollarfuckyou.com/ I've made about 300$ :/
  • SuperPaintMan 10y ago
    I love this. Make an App and hook into IAP
    • yeahdef 10y ago
      Thinking of the non-app-future, my plan is to use it as a learning case for a PWA https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/ https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/
  • beefhash 10y ago
    > G-rated Version: $DU The link there is dead.
  • vishbar 10y ago
    It looks like your SFW link is broken
    • yeahdef 10y ago
      ah - you're right - i haven't looked at this thing in a while. G-rated version never made any money, I think I'll let it go out to pasture.
  • many_bells_down 10y ago
    Really interesting idea! Have you encountered any legal issues?
    • yeahdef 10y ago
      no, I spoke with a lawyer friend who seemed to think I have all my bases covered.
• jastr 10y ago
  TheSimplePostcard.com, makes me ~$220/month. Text it a photo and it sends a postcard. It took me a few long weekends to build using Django and Twilio.
  • karolisram 10y ago
    Sweet project, like it a lot :) perhaps do the same for Europe?
    • jastr 10y ago
      I need to find a postcard printer in Europe.
      • quanglam2807 10y ago
        You can try https://www.kite.ly https://www.kite.ly
      • pbhjpbhj 10y ago
        Vistaprint? They're a massive German operation - mind you every town has at least one print shop but VP already has a custom printing system, their parent company have a print fulfillment API (https://open.cimpress.io/ https://open.cimpress.io/). [Just an occasional private customer]
  • donohoe 10y ago
    Cool. How do you process payments via text? I assume you send them a link to a page to complete transaction?
    • jastr 10y ago
      Exactly. I looked in to charging via their phone bill but couldn't find an API.
  • wonderwonder 10y ago
    very creative, I like it
• loloferrari 10y ago
  Been trying to do this for years, never really succeeded. In 2016 i've relaunched https://www.interssl.com/en/ https://www.interssl.com/en/ but when i'm being honest there are just too many support incidents. So i just can't call it passive income anymore - even if that was the initial idea. The margin of sales without support basically just covers the cost for the orders that require heavy support. Remaining income is basically blown for advertising and maintaining the site. My conclusions: a) think twice about potential time killers - even if the core business model per se is passive, it might turn out to be time intensive ... b) i'd rather not go into reselling something anymore but rather sell my own product, gives me more financial headroom. my 2 cents.
  • Romajashi 10y ago
    letsencrypt is free, wosign is free; maybe there's something else which is free; they don't require a lof of effort to install them. who are your customers then who pay for what they can get for free?
• joshuak 10y ago
  "Investment" is not income, passive or otherwise. Income is step one. Investment of that income is step two. A "salary" is income that is bound to time worked. "Passive income" is income that is not bound to time worked. The key difference between passive income vs investing, is what is being invested. With passive income like salary _time_ is the investment, not money. That's why it's income. All the comments discussing saving and investment strategies are rather missing the point of the question.
• durkie 10y ago
  i own a decent amount of tesla stock and 2016 was a great year for lending it out. since tesla is such a controversial company, lots of people want to own the stock (expecting it to go up) and lots of people want to short sell it (expecting it go down). if you're a stock holder, certain places (like interactive brokers) will let you lend your stock holdings to people that want to sell it short. you earn a premium on this loan, but its basically risk-free since the brokerage bears the counter-party risk. because short interest is so high, there was a substantial portion of 2016 where there weren't enough shares available to satisfy short sellers' demand. TSLA became classified as "hard to borrow" and borrowing premiums would be anywhere from 8% to 100+% depending on the day/demand. this is money short sellers pay on top of the cost to purchase the shares (and one more thing to bear on top of the risk of short-selling, but that's another story). the premium is paid daily, and the brokerage usually takes a chunk of it (often half), so if you had $100k of tesla stock and the premium was 50%, you'd earn (100,000 * 50% * (1/2) / 365) = $68.50 for each day that someone borrowed your shares. the rate fluctuated daily, but this still netted me several thousand dollars of truly passive income, since i was planning to hold the stock either way. this is also a huge income stream for institutional shareholders that are sitting on millions of shares.
  • icebraining 10y ago
    its basically risk-free since the brokerage bears the counter-party risk. Well, unless the brokerage itself goes under, no?
    • durkie 10y ago
      Yes, but I would think that's always a risk.
      • csomar 10y ago
        That's part of what you are getting paid for. You are getting paid for providing TSLA liquidity and risk of default on loans.
        • 10y ago
• shellerik 10y ago
  $50k from investment earnings (index funds, mostly 401k - I'm in my 40s). $20k from a website I built a couple years ago (searchable product catalog with Amazon affiliate links).
  • shostack 10y ago
    Was that dividends or just unrealized gains in the fund price?
• jdmoreira 10y ago
  I'm very curious to know how much both 64bites.com and buildyourownlisp.com made this year. Maybe the authors would like to comment? :)
• kohanz 10y ago
  This was pretty accidental, but to motivate myself to complete the arduous application process for my professional engineering license, I creates a WordPress blog documenting the process. Also because I thought I would learn something new (setting up WP blog) and this seemed very "shippable". I completed the application process over the course of a year and haven't written a blog post in over a year. Thanks to a complete lack of material in this niche, the site (http://pengapplicant.ca http://pengapplicant.ca) gets a decent amount of organic search traffic given the niche size (2k page views per month) and I make about $15/month in Adsense. Recently I was also contacted by someone who sells materials for the application and exam and have become an affiliate for them. It's only been one month, but i've already made one referral which netted me $100. So passive income on this after hosting costs is probably $220-ish and will be more in 2017 hopefully with more affiliate sales. Obviously very small potatoes, but I never set out to make any money for this and it looks like now it will at least cover my yearly professional dues ;) To be honest, the best part is the messages I get from people saying how I helped them get their license. That's a much nicer feeling than the $.
  • wordpressdev 10y ago
    By changing ad placements, and adding a more ad units, you can increase your Adsense earnings significantly.
    • chei0iaV 10y ago
      And add banners pleading to disable Adblock, right?
    • zild3d 10y ago
      I would think a few relevant amazon affiliate links (text books, calculators, etc) could out-earn the current $15/month ads as well.
  • coupdejarnac 10y ago
    You should offer paid content through Gumroad or something. That said, the PE exam was a breeze for me (took computer engineering exam). I'm slightly horrified that the failure rate is 50%.
• gottebp 10y ago
  Breville coffee grinders are impossible to get internal parts for. I designed a 3D printed upgrade for the main wear-part in their BCG800XL SmartGrinder. The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use ifixit[2] to drive the traffic. It's passively making ~$425/mo with about 10 minutes of work per week on my end. This all happened because my grinder failed and I couldn't get parts. [1] https://www.shapeways.com/product/NASLAGCCP/breville-bcg800xl-coffee-grinder-impeller-upgrade https://www.shapeways.com/product/NASLAGCCP/breville-bcg800x... [2] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to+Worn+Impeller/62905 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to...
  • shostack 10y ago
    What's the legality of that?
    • gottebp 10y ago
      Hmm, it's my own custom design and not a copy of Breville's. The blade geometry is especially different. Is that the angle you were thinking of?
      • 100pctremote 10y ago
        lol
  • cpach 10y ago
    Honestly, that’s one of the coolest side projects I’ve heard of this year. Kudos!
  • PascLeRasc 10y ago
    This is really cool and I'm sure many here would love a longer write up of your process doing this.
  • sean_patel 10y ago
    > about 10 minutes of work per week on my end. ... and on the guide. > Sandpaper and a file are likely optional. They are only necessary if the 3D printed impeller isn't a perfect fit. Do you get any "support" queries from people who buy the impeller and then try to fit it, and it's tight (by your own admission a deliberate design choice) and they try to email you or return the impeller? Not trolling, genuinely curious.
• djaychela 10y ago
  I've written a book on using Cubase with a general grounding in music, recording and music technology [1]. Income has been very patchy, and never what I'd hoped for at any point. Best month has been around £450, but that's only happened a couple of times (I don't know why, either, unfortunately), usually it's more like £40. Made about £2000 in total, so definitely not something to retire on. Unsure as to whether it's the market for the book, the quality of the book (I hope not and don't think so given the positive feedback I have had from those who have bought it), or a total lack of marketing that's at fault. Not entirely passive as I've had to update it for each revision of the software that has come along, which takes around a week's full time work. [1]http://www.lulu.com/shop/darren-jones/the-complete-guide-to-music-technology-using-cubase-9/paperback/product-22955472.html http://www.lulu.com/shop/darren-jones/the-complete-guide-to-...
  • onlyfortoday2 10y ago
    Unsure as to whether it's the market for the book, the quality of the book (I hope not and don't think so given the positive feedback I have had from those who have bought it), or a !total lack of marketing! that's at fault. i dont think your unsure you know :)
• eevilspock 10y ago
  This post is what's wrong with Capitalism. Rent seeking. The Matthew Effect. Making money by making money.
  • shostack 10y ago
    Generally, the people interested in this are interested because time is the most valuable resource of all. If they can obtain enough passive income to be independently wealthy, they can contribute to humanity in whatever way they choose vs being forced to sell their time to a day job where they have limited control of their life. Creating value and receiving some percent of that as rent is not inherently a bad behavior. But if you think you have a better, more "noble" answer, I'd love to hear it.
    • eevilspock 10y ago
      Now on the HN front page: Great Problems: An Epidemic of Rent-Seeking https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153047 > obtain enough passive income to be independently wealthy "Passive income" does not make you "independently wealthy". You avoid "being forced to sell [your] time" because you extract wealth from those who do. Rent seeking does not, by definition, involve "creating value": In economics and in public-choice theory, rent-seeking involves seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through poor allocation of resources, reduced actual wealth creation, lost government revenue, increased income inequality, and (potentially) national decline. - Wikipedia From Taking Back Adam Smith and “Classic Liberalism”: Many conservative economists claim to be staunch followers of Adam Smith. They shout slogans such as “Supply and Demand!” “Capitalism”! “ “Let the markets work!” However, for anyone who actually read Adam Smith, you would note that the “invisible hand” was not his only observation of the inner workings of capitalism. Adam Smith recognized that many in the economy were making gobs of money, but weren’t contributing anything. He was referring to what was eventually called “economic rent”. Smith observed that all production required 3 things. Land, Capital, and Labor. A very simple example would be a brick factory. The building and oven needed to create the bricks are the “capital” – the owners are the capitalists. The people making the bricks is the “labor” – the people doing the actual work. The Land the factory occupies and the clay used to make the bricks is the “land” – the owners of the land are the “Rentiers”. Any money made by selling the bricks is then divided up between these three groups: the rentiers, the capitalists, and the workers. Where many here on HN and I will differ is what forms of passive income are rent seeking rather value creating applications of the output of one's previous labor. Note that you can even be pro-Capitalism and anti-rent-seeking: How Economists Duped Us into Attacking Capitalism Instead of Parasitic Rent-Seeking http://evonomics.com/economists-duped-attacking-capitalism/ http://evonomics.com/economists-duped-attacking-capitalism/
• discreditable 10y ago
  I wrote a guide on how to get around my local ISP's requirement to use their crappy modem/router combo and recommended a verified-working router with an Amazon affiliate link. Since Jan 1. I've pulled in $160. Very nice since I host at nearlyfreespeech.net and the site has cost less than $1 in hosting this year, and $10 for the domain.
• boudra 10y ago
  Launched this small tool 5 weeks ago: http://sqlify.io http://sqlify.io Made a few dollars with AdSense.
  • raybb 10y ago
    Just so you know, your site doesn't work too well on mobile (an ad makes the page too wide and displaces text).
• jccalhoun 10y ago
  i made like $125 in amazon gift cards between swagbucks and bing(now microsoft) rewards points.
• Shrugs 10y ago
  I made http://fivestar.io/ http://fivestar.io/ a year or two ago; it's a better Amazon search. It shines when you search for something that you want the best version of, without caring about the details; i.e., let the masses determine the quality for you. It weights results based on ratings, review volume, and some other stuff, segmenting the results by price range. Helps me answer the question "I want the best phone mount for my bike, but I don't want to spend more than $20" without fiddling with Amazon's search parameters and then scanning the page. Makes ~$100/month off of affiliate links.
  • xioxox 10y ago
    Interesting. Have you thought about an option for non-US amazon, e.g. .uk / .de?
    • Shrugs 10y ago
      I have, but the API differs in availability/completeness across regions and writing the code to handle each region probably isn't worth the time. The Product Advertising API is also _terrible_ and not fun to work with, so I'm minimizing the amount of time I spend working with it and reading their docs.
  • gabemart 10y ago
    What volume of traffic / searches do you get?
    • Shrugs 10y ago
      1000 uniques/month on average, not including when I post the site on hacker news. The clickthrough/conversion rate is pretty solid. 35% of users buy something after clicking through to Amazon, which makes sense cause it's a pretty strong signal of intent.
  • raybb 10y ago
    Isn't it against Amazon's terms to use the affiliate API to make a search engine?
• koyao 10y ago
  Sold a condo in California and bought two investment properties in Texas.
• cannin 10y ago
  Passive investing in commission-free index exchange traded funds (ETFs) along with a lazy portfolio explorer (http://portfolios.lunean.com/ http://portfolios.lunean.com/) to analyze ETF portfolios (e.g. backtesting, portfolio comparisons, and ETF correlations).
  • hrez 10y ago
    You have a mess in fund names. I.e. "VTI 60% Total Bond Market ETF" etc.
• shadykiller 10y ago
  I don't need to invest anywhere. My company invests for me in 401k and by the time i retire i will get $401,000 as the name suggests :)
• alecmgo 10y ago
  http://www.siliconvalleyguide.org http://www.siliconvalleyguide.org is a geeky tour guide to Silicon Valley. It makes about $10/month in ads.
  • tomcam 10y ago
    Fun! Good idea. Duly bookmarked.
• alecmgo 10y ago
  http://www.siliconvalleyguide.org http://www.siliconvalleyguide.org is a geeky tour guide to Silicon Valley. It makes about $10/month in ads.
• brandables 10y ago
  https://brandfountain.com https://brandfountain.com I sold a domain I had intended to develop this year to a FB founder for $12,000 and another for $7,500. After researching I found there are few places to buy really good startup domains so I made brandfountain to passively fund my startup(s)!
  • bbernoulli 10y ago
    maybe you could partner with that AI generated logos guy (was posted within the last couple weeks, can't remember the name, sorry) edit: i'm remembering it as logojoy
• wlievens 10y ago
  Stock appreciation and dividends.
• t0mislav 10y ago
  25$/month in Adsense. Not much, but it's passive and it grows. Everything started as a fun small project. http://random.country/ http://random.country/
  • assafmo 10y ago
    Cool!
  • berdario 10y ago
    Parsing of the capital name doesn't handle Switzerland properly
    • t0mislav 10y ago
      Ok, will check, thanks!
  • thenaterhood 10y ago
    I'm really curious to know how you promote and get traffic to a site like that. I've seen a couple and I've been working on my own, but I've never known how they get discovered.
    • t0mislav 10y ago
      I didn't promote too much, I just put link in signature on two forums I occasionally visit and forget about it for a few months. Later, people somehow find it. Over the time there were few twitter posts about it, few share on 4chan and similar pages. Then your rank on Google gets better, and so on.
• andreshb 10y ago
  Airbnb listings in NYC, BOG, MDE - make enough to live almost anywhere I want.
• 37463892 10y ago
  I make about $80 a month from (http://redreport.org/ http://redreport.org/), mainly from organic search traffic.
  • RhodesianHunter 10y ago
    It would probably be more if the ads didn't actually cover the content.
• BorisMelnik 10y ago
  Started a hosting company: its very small and only offers shared hosting right now, but it is almost making money. I never wanted to get into hosting, but so many of my clients were using Godaddy etc I just had to get them away from that chaos. Note: I'm also looking for a partner in this if anyone has any experience let me know.
  • arrmn 10y ago
    How did you start did you buy the servers or are you just using one of the cloud providers and "whitelabel" them?
  • tomcam 10y ago
    Try webhostingtalk.com to find partners or advice.
• AtticusTheGreat 10y ago
  I just recently launched a statuspage aggregator at https://statusbeacon.io https://statusbeacon.io which has been pretty cool to work on. I've also got an online multiplayer boggle game that has made me low 3 digits per month since about 2008, http://serpentinegame.com http://serpentinegame.com, mostly ad revenue but also paid memberships.
  • rovr138 10y ago
    Looked at statusbeacon.io. Is there a place to see all the providers you monitor without having to sign up?
    • AtticusTheGreat 10y ago
      Hey, currently no I don't have that list in a public place. So far I have 43 services integrated, and most of those are fairly big ones like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, etc. I was thinking about making the list available on the landing page though, so maybe I'll do that. Anything in particular you're looking for?
    • AtticusTheGreat 10y ago
      I just put up a list here: https://statusbeacon.io/service-list https://statusbeacon.io/service-list
• hogrammer 10y ago
  NVDA
• robius 10y ago
  I used to do index funds. Then I went looking for an active portfolio manager. After a few years I found one, he was good, but 6mo in he switched jobs and left for another career. The next guy wasn't good and eventually didn't want to actively manage the account. I kept looking until this year when I found fractalgo, which is used by large institutional investors to trade through science without emotion and second-guessing. Downside is you needed to be a qualified investor. I called up the owner curious about how the fractal tech worked and found out he was setting up a service for everyone, not just the big guys. After some research I moved my IRAs left over from previous 401Ks to a custodian that can do directed investments + broker and let the automated system go. Couldn't be happier. No humans required once set up, and it keeps growing like a weed while I sleep. Do your own research for what works for you and seek it out. You will find it, eventually. https://fractalgo.com https://fractalgo.com Since doing so well, they just opened a fund using the same technology. https://fractalternative.com https://fractalternative.com
  • n-exploit 10y ago
    What type of returns are you seeing? How has it performed in down periods? What's your beta?
    • robius 10y ago
      The owner sent me his returns from 2007 and it's a steady upward slope, even through down times. I just started last month, and I'm up overall, although the Trump event took some back. The system takes these draw downs into account. If I told you I made $11K last month it's mostly meaningless since the size of the account and markets you choose are important. So I don't have enough data for you, but the data that was shared with me was better than anything else I've tried. And I've done day trading too. This is much simpler and passive once set up. Feel free to reach out if you want, see profile info.
      • jabagawee 10y ago
        How did the Trump event take some earnings back? Since the election, markets have been going very steadily up.
• PascLeRasc 10y ago
  Adding an optional buy button to my Chrome Extension has made me $0.59 so far, so technically that's my best. My friend has made about $650 off of his AMD investment so far though and is thinking of moving all of it into Micron.
  • tomcam 10y ago
    Stop with the bragging. You're killing us here!
• armenarmen 10y ago
  I built catelus.com a couple weeks ago and I've done $130 in revenue. It's a domain name idea generator. You feed it a keyword and it translates it into 30+ languages and shows you .com's that are not being used. Trying now to get more eyeballs across it. Fun though!
  • anchpop 10y ago
    Your domain lookup doesn't seem to work, unless I'm misunderstanding something. Searching "smart" brings up elegant.com which is certainly taken. Edit: are you doing a lookup of the raw version instead of the cleaned one?
    • armenarmen 10y ago
      I'm doing the look up on the raw version yeah. I'm working in weeding out false positives now. Squated domains that aren't pointing to anthe thing are right now registering as available. Moving to an actual Whois lookup has to get better results. Thanks for taking a look! And I appreciate the feedback
• jventura 10y ago
  I did an Android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flatangle.charts https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flatangle....) earning me some 80€ since August. Hope next year will be better!
• nemoniac 10y ago
  So does Bitcoin not count as passive income?
• jsaxton86 10y ago
  It seems like the vast majority of employment contracts prohibit side projects like this, or at the very least, require explicit company approval. I'm interested in hearing strategies on how to best pursue side projects without violating one's employment contract.
  • fapjacks 10y ago
    One way is to be a California employee, where the labor law explicitly protects your side projects as long as you aren't using your employer's resources and isn't related to your day job. If you decide to take something Big Time and make a startup around one of your ideas, California also conveniently ignores non-compete agreements. These two things are why Silicon Valley exists in California and nowhere else.
  • hacknat 10y ago
    I'm in a state that is notorious for enforcing non-competes (in fact our enlightened legislature tried to make them even stiffer), but even my contract says my non-compete is only enforceable where a clear conflict of interest exists.
  • martin_a 10y ago
    In Germany tax laws might help you a little bit with this. If you build something with the main interest of making money out of it, the state (and most probably your employer) will treat it as a business and want you to run a business for that or will likely forbid to do it. But if you build something because you need it for yourself and are running it more like a hobby but make profits from it, there´s something called "Liebhaberei". This special status mainly has tax implications (you can´t get refunds on losses from your Liebhaberei because it´s not qualified as a business, tax-wise...) but I´ve had friends which got their side projects "approved" by their employers because they did not look like real businesses and were run on this Liebhaberei status. So if you like miniature railways and build a niche site around it, which will give you beer money (or a bit more), the tax people most probably won´t have any problems with that. You should avoid doing things that look like you are running a business (having a shop, selling stuff), but most of them probably won´t even notice affiliate links or understand what that does. This can also help you with your employer. "Boss, I have this site about my miniature railways and now it´s making 50 bucks a month, is that a problem?" Or you go the right way. Be honest and say that you´d like to do something for fun but there could be money involved and you just wanted to make sure that´s okay for everybody. I found employers to be unexpectedly tolerant when you´re honest.
• jeremyt 10y ago
  Bitcoin
• odbol_ 10y ago
  I made about $10 from app sales of my Android Wear watchfaces https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.odbol.fountainoftime.wear https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.odbol.foun... and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.odbol.oxwoodwatchface.wear https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.odbol.oxwo... $10... For the whole year. App sales aren't the golden goose everyone things they are.
• woodyb23 10y ago
  Bitcoin has been my most profitable.
  • addonis1990 10y ago
    Can you elaborate please ? I am considering investing a some time in bitcoin and blockchain next year and I would really appreciate your insights. What tools/services/websites did you use ? Did you learn that on your own ? what resources did you use ?
    • j_s 10y ago
      Pretty sure Bitcoin works best for the people who got in early. anon4this1: I bought 5800 bitcoins mostly for around $5 back in 2011ish [...] I'm up 15,400% in 5 years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13093895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13093895
      • jklein11 10y ago
        I think anon4this1 dropped a few zeroes there
• woodyb23 10y ago
  Bitcoin has been my most profitable.
• joelrunyon 10y ago
  I've been running https://UltimatePaleoGuide.com https://UltimatePaleoGuide.com for a number of years now. This last year we launched https://PaleoMealPlans.com https://PaleoMealPlans.com and it's been a great product / service so far in addition to the rest of our offerings.
• halcyondaze 10y ago
  ~$2k/mo from an informational hobby-related website I run and monetize with affiliate sales. Growing, too!
  • tomcam 10y ago
    Are you able to keep it enjoyable? Invariably when I ask people who run hobby-based stores selling things like toy trains, comic books, or stamps, they tell me it's no longer fun to them.
    • halcyondaze 10y ago
      Yes, I am expanding offline as well because I want to explore it as much as possible. Still fun for me, and what isn't I try to outsource to others.
• wonderwonder 10y ago
  Built an saas document management & review site for a very large company 3 years ago. I have a monthly maintenance contract with them and receive about $3,500 per month. After expenses (insurance & hosting) and my partners split I net $1,300 per month. Over the last 2 years, I have invested an average of about 2 hours a month, most months I do no work at all.
• xchaotic 10y ago
  I have a rental property, it's not much, barely breaking even on mortgage payments, but the hope is I will have the principal as an asset when the mortgage is paid off and any payments coming in will be pure bonus.
• pfooti 10y ago
  I wrote a blog post about three years ago about doing single-sign-on stuff between salesforce and google by writing a google appengine app that acted as a SAML IDp. At the time, salesforce didn't speak OAUTH and google didn't natively speak SAML, so you had to do it on your own. I put it on an old blog I had laying around and turned on google adsense. To date, I've made $6.31 from that blog post alone. Someday, I'll get over $100, so adsense will pay out.
  • icebraining 10y ago
    I wonder how much you could have made by SaaS-ing it.
• ronnier 10y ago
  $2,550 in rental home income on a house that will be paid off in 3 months.
  • tomcam 10y ago
    What a great feeling!
• errozero 10y ago
  I released the new version of my Acid Machine synth + drum machine web-app just under a month ago. It has made about £200 in the last month. The web-based version is like a demo, it's free to use but saving and importing is disabled. I'm selling a downloadable desktop app version which has the restrictions removed. I'm thinking of making it completely free and maybe selling ad-space on there instead. http://www.errozero.co.uk/acid-machine http://www.errozero.co.uk/acid-machine
• kidproquo 10y ago
  Tasktopus, is a lightweight, task manager for the desktop (Mac OS X, Windows and Linux). Tasks are managed on a Kanban-style board with Backlog, Doing, Done and Archived columns. Built with Qt. 14-day trial on Gumroad[0]. Also available on Mac App Store[1]. MAS version has made me 40$/month. Gumroad version is better (lets you try it and lets you use same license key on all 3 platforms). However, I have sold only one license on Gumroad! I guess the MAS has better discoverability. [0] https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus [1] https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/tasktopus/id1039688985 https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/tasktopus/id1039688985
• srigi 10y ago
  Running ransomware network. For $6000 investment you can get $80000/month rent coming to you.
• brulard 10y ago
  In 2012 I created devices mockups and was selling it since on graphicriver. https://graphicriver.net/item/devices-responsive-web-mockups-/2920264 https://graphicriver.net/item/devices-responsive-web-mockups... . It was sold more than 3400 times already, and made about $800/month in the first few months. Now the income is somewhere around $25/mo but it's been 4 years since. The funny thing is, that I have never seen these devices close-up in real life before creating these mockups :)
• vuchkov 10y ago
  2K, domain & hosting services. | thx, god!
• treistab2 10y ago
  My friend and I made an online course for User Experience Design, and sold it on Udemy. So far we have about $40,000 in enrollment revenue, which yields about $20,000 in profit that we split. We are looking into doing more courses, but aren't sure yet what to teach. If anyone wants to collaborate on a project, we have a full studio and all of the equipment. Here is a link to the course: https://www.udemy.com/user-experience-design-the-accelerated-ux-course/ https://www.udemy.com/user-experience-design-the-accelerated... In addition to that project, I also launched an online store for design patent artwork. To do this, I downloaded images of patents from the US Patent Office Database, paid a virtual assistant $1/hour to clean them and standardize the proportions, then using a Photoshop Action applied in Batch, I generated all of the images. After getting all of the images, I built an online store and integrated with printing and fulfillment service using Woocommerce and a Restful API - so when orders are placed, it triggers the artwork to be printed, and shipped, automatically. I now make about $300/month from that project and spend about 10 minutes/week managing it. Here is a link to that website: www.PatentArtStore.com Anyone have any suggestions for my next project?
  • jklepatch 10y ago
    Very creative I love it. Your store might need to be a bit polished though. For example, on mobile: - Shop now button too small. Should be bigger and more visible ("call to action") - One item per line on shop page, otherwise really hard to see the pic Wish u good luck for ur project!
• xni 10y ago
  Bought Oclus Rift, played with it a lot, then created a site where you can take them for rent. Got #1 position in Google for "rent oculus". Outcome: about 4k this year. Now stopped it.