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Ask HN: Passive income ideas for solo developers?
I'm a web developer who is looking for passive income ideas. I'm actively looking for income sources that fit well to my skills.
Do you have any recommendations, ideas, stories?
Thanks.
- wolco 9y agoAdsense / content sites. Automated saas business. Stock market.
- ghughes 9y agoThe first two are sensible suggestions, but playing the stock market is essentially gambling. Most people would be better off investing in index funds.
- dsacco 9y agoI think the parent meant index funds. Index funds are the only kind of market participation that you can reasonably call "passive."
- StavrosK 9y agoI've recently heard doubts that index funds are a good investment. They're meant to be "investing in the US market", but aren't they really "investing in the Vanguard/whatever ETF"? Basically, doesn't the value of index funds reflect how much people think index funds will rise in value?
- conception 9y agoIndex fund prices are tied to an index, hence the name. If the DOW goes up for a DOW index fund that fund will increase in value proportionally. Vanguard gets paid for managing the fund.
- StavrosK 9y agoAh, so the value of an ETF isn't what someone else is willing to pay for it, like a stock? EDIT: Apparently you can exchange the ETF for the underlying securities at any point, and vice versa, so the ETF's price can't diverge much.
- encoderer 9y agoIt's not so much that you can exchange a share of an ETF for micro-shares of the underlying security, but that the ETFs themselves keep their assets in the underlying and if it gets out of balance professional investors will short one side and go long the other and make the difference -- a form of arbitrage. Specifically, in the case of SPY, if the ETF was trading higher than the underlying, they would short the ETF and go long an appropriate number of shares of each of the 500 companies. The difference in the price is their profit. The very act of doing this brings the two prices inline and eventually you sell both sides and close the position for realized gains. Brokers let you do these transactions atomically. Of course, for transaction fees alone, this is not a strategy available to retail investors.
- tanderson92 9y agoThis is correct; Authorized Participants are the ones who exchange baskets of securities. It isn't really possible for individuals to exchange shares directly with the fund manager, but that's not an issue because the secondary market prices are kept reasonably close due to the professionals. The amount you can expect to lose relative to NAV (the actual value of your shares) is around half the bid-ask spread at the time you buy/sell. It also helps with tax efficiency since the creation/redemption process allows for shares with significant appreciation to be retired.
- StavrosK 9y agoI see, thank you for the clarification.
- bobbington 9y agoNot really the ETFs are generally backed by the actual securities they represent. They may deviate from market value a bit intraday, but those deviations are picked up by special arbitrageurs and quickly eliminated. http://www.understandetfs.org/creation_redemption.html http://www.understandetfs.org/creation_redemption.html
- StavrosK 9y agoAh I see, thanks, I wasn't aware of that mechanism. So you can basically exchange the ETF for the actual held securities at any point, which keeps the price near that of the securities, pretty clever.
- bobbington 9y agoI'm not sure that anyone can, but just that certain large entities can, and it is apparently profitable for them to do so, so they have incentive to keep it in line. If it's selling for less than it's worth, they will "cash out" at the end of the day and pick up the underlying shares at a discount. If it's selling for more than it's worth, they will buy more underlying securities and create new shares that sell for more than they are worth. I'm no expert though so it would be good to look into it more.
- tcbawo 9y agoThe thought is that with index funds, you're invested in enough of the market that you don't have to pick winners and losers and you get rebalanced as well. It would be interesting to study the market cap effect of going from #501 to #500 in the S&P ratings. If you think the entire market is overbought, then they might not provide the best returns over the short term. However, most people are very bad at timing the market or picking the strongest companies that will thrive in a down market.
- ksherlock 9y agoThere S&P 500 is selected by a committee so there is no #501.
- tanderson92 9y agoTechnically there are 505 due to dual-share classes for 5 of the securities in the index.
- tcbawo 9y agoMy point is that there is probably a bump going in and a hit falling out. This wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies) shows the additions and removals. I am curious about the distortive effects of demand from the S&P 500 as a proxy for the effects of passive investing.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- huckyaus 9y agoThis topic has been covered extensively on HN. Check out some of the past submissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=passive%20income https://hn.algolia.com/?query=passive%20income
- neurocroc 9y agoI made an open source search engine that searches her user curated mind maps on the web. Here is the search : https://learn-anything.xyz/ https://learn-anything.xyz/ Since everything is open source and I can't run ads or add any sponsored content, the only way to support it is through Patreon. I think it is a pretty cool idea and solves a big problem of not knowing how how best to start learning a topic or what learning some topic X is. I hope people will find it useful.
- notjackson 9y agoThis is an awesome site, thank you!
- gt_ 9y agoAwesome is right. Would you link your patreon here, please?
- ripexz 9y agoNot OP but got it from the GitHub repo: https://www.patreon.com/learnanything https://www.patreon.com/learnanything
- alishan-l 9y agoVery cool!
- subsidd 9y agoI was starting to build something similar but your execution seems better, thank you!
- throwaway2016a 9y agoI'm a little late commenting but... > Since everything is open source and I can't run ads or add any sponsored content, the only way to support it is through Patreon. I think it is a pretty cool idea and solves a big problem of not knowing how how best to start learning a topic or what learning some topic X is. How so? There is nothing in the open source model that prohibits this. Is it because it because you feel that the type of people who are interested in open source will get angry if you have ads?
- renownedmedia 9y agoPublish some books on the knowledge you've accrued.
- perlgeek 9y agoWhile this is fun if you like writing, it's not really a reliable or efficient source of income. It takes me about 6 to 10 months to write a tech book in my spare time, and unless one hits the popularity jackpot at some point, I don't think they will pay off financially. (But published books do make a very nice line on a CV)
- Swizec 9y agoI do this. It's hard to grow at first and there's plenty of ongoing marketing work but after 2 years I could already go full time if I didn't insist on living in SF. It's a fun little cottage industry.
- dsacco 9y agoMy definition of "passive income" is income for which you need not work more than five hours a week. Some people are stricter and define it to mean no work each week. With very few exceptions, there are no opportunities which will actually end up being passive income for you just because you're a web developer. There are several opportunities to increase your income, but it's rare that they are fully automatable (or even feasible as a part time venture). One option is running a successful service company; this is by definition not passive unless you own it and don't need to actively manage it. So that's out. Likewise, a productized SaaS company is not passive unless you have very minimal customer support requirements, new feature development and marketing to do. That's overwhelmingly unlikely (if you look through the routine threads asking HN for SaaS success stories, you don't typically find instances where there is a minimal time commitment). I'm not trying to discourage you from developing a successful stream of income. I'm just trying to push back against the idea that you can reliably generate income passively using web development skills. There are a few options that can require very little time (in theory, I still don't think you'll easily get there in practice). But I think the only one that will leverage web development and still be mostly passive is running a network of websites monetized through ads that have low effort content. Other than that, maybe write a useful ebook and promote it until it has excellent SEO and referrals.
- thakobyan 9y agoThanks for the great answer. Maybe I should have mentioned "side income" not "passive income".
- shanecleveland 9y agoNow we're talking ... so what sort of web dev do you do? For a business, in an agency, for your own clients? It's all about solving problems. What problems have you solved for them or yourself that you can automate?
- thakobyan 9y agoI work full-time but want to start something on the side. I've built couple projects in the past but nothing that major that generates income.
- halayli 9y agotake on 1-month or less web related projects on upwork and the like?
- sunilkumarc 9y agoMy account was recently suspended from Upwork because I was applying for more number of jobs without landing at any. When I sent a mail to Upwork support, they said they cannot help me once it is suspended. Currently I'm trying to find some work on freelancer.com. Do you know any other similar websites for freelancing for beginners?
- tomtompl 9y agothere's also remote.com
- SirLJ 9y agoAs someone said bellow, the stock market is a good place to look and develop a quantitative trading systems, it is almost free to build and back test and once done, will run on autopilot, but you'll need capital to invest... Good luck!
- nurettin 9y agoNeeding "Good luck" defeats the whole purpose if these kinds of threads. QT is a complete waste of time as most of the skill you will acquire revolves around hopelessly looking for patterns that don't exist within time series. Flag formation? Predictive capability: zero. Trend: zero. Congestion: zero. Most positions win? Great. The one that doesn't will take it all back.
- SirLJ 9y agoI do agree that candle formations like head and shoulders, bull flags, etc do not work in the market (at least for me), but I don't quite get your point on why QT is a waste of time, since there are a lot of systems and people big and small beating the market on a regular basis, so let me give you 1 quote from Warren Buffett: “Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace, and those who read their Graham & Dodd will continue to prosper.”
- nurettin 9y agoMy point is, QT methods have zero predictive capability, and are a complete waste of time and will not give you any usable skills in any other field, either. Opportunity trading (what Mr. Warren and others who occasionally profit from the market do) on the other hand, are entirely different animals. Not sure what you didn't understand.
- SirLJ 9y agoAgree to disagree, a lot of examples, best is probably Renaissance Technologies
- startupdiscuss 9y agoSolve one of these with a SaaS solution: https://www.oppslist.com/ https://www.oppslist.com/
- 02thoeva 9y agoWe launched https://emailoctopus.com https://emailoctopus.com around 3 years ago as a side project. The most difficult thing with launching a SaaS is the early days, where you've spent hours upon hours building the app and are only bringing in £400 a month. We stuck with it though and today have a full-time team of 5 working on the app, are paying ourselves a similar wage to what we were earning in our full-time jobs and most importantly have almost complete ownership of our work-life balance. I'd really recommend a SaaS business if you are after recurring, side revenue and as mentioned before https://www.oppslist.com/ https://www.oppslist.com/ is a great place to get some initial ideas. Your marketing skills will improve too - just stick with it for a year or so if you do go that route!
- thakobyan 9y agoThank you! Very helpful. Never heard of oppslist but excited to check it out.
- cdiamand 9y agoHey Thakobyan! Cory@oppslist.com here. I've got around 2000+ of these "saas" ideas, so feel free to drop me a line if you're looking for something in a specific field!
- comsci-bro 9y agoHow do you even get started with building (and then marketing) a SaaS? Can you share some helpful resources?
- 02thoeva 9y agoWe did write an article here: https://medium.com/emailoctopus/the-road-to-one-billion-emails-4ed7d441e190 https://medium.com/emailoctopus/the-road-to-one-billion-emai... Although in short, we built a product to serve our own need, launched it totally free for everyone and ended up gaining around 2000 users very quickly. Within a year we had grown MRR to the £3k mark, so we contracted alongside running this 2 days a week. Now, another further year on we're full-time with a few employees.
- amdixon 9y agoIn addition to https://www.oppslist.com https://www.oppslist.com (as some have already mentioned), check out https://www.indiehackers.com https://www.indiehackers.com. Although not all the businesses are entirely passive per se, there are a lot of interesting stories and projects that you might find inspiring.
- duckingtest 9y agoAffiliate marketing. I'm making about $10k/month from several sites I don't really update. The trick is to install yourself in some customer acquisition path no one else figured out. When I started my first attempt I didn't even expect to make the domain registration fee back over a year, I did it mostly out of boredom. Don't look out for affiliate solutions specifically, but keep an eye out for them. Especially when you found some product/service that's hard to find, but very valuable - do they have an affiliate program? Great, that's your chance - especially because, being a customer, you probably know better than them what's their main selling point! No more details than that, sorry. I'm not trying to sell you anything. In affiliate marketing be super wary of those that try, most likely that's their real income source. It's mostly a parasitic income but sadly that's how current economy is, honest productive work pays the least relative to what it brings. Mostly thanks to central banks that artificially prevented a giant systemic reset.
- nickthemagicman 9y agoThis sounds very cool. What level of detail are your sites? Are they static sites with your affiliate links on the front page? Where do you find your affiliates that are buying leads? I'm very interested in this and am trying to figure out how to do just a basic affiliate site setup.
- ingenuous2 9y agoThese are all the secret sauce that very few affiliates will tell you. As OP said, you have to find your own unique niche. If you write convertible copy, you can find an existing affiliate chain and try to use that to leverage your advantage. Otherwise, I recommend trying something that's out there, realize you won't be able to compete in your first niche (too much competition), then use that to learn. Your first ROI might be 25%. Try again, find another niche, until you find the right one. This is classic explore/exploit game theory (every well publicized channel, e.g. the "Bingo Card Creator" of affiliate world) will be Red Queen'd to death. note - not "great" copy, but copy that converts! (Or maybe you make landers that convert like crazy, or you have enough money to buy a ton of traffic and conversion optimize like crazy)
- antoaravinth 9y agoMay be you need to look into https://www.indiehackers.com https://www.indiehackers.com. The site is great that it contains all the information / stories / ideas, about developers who sell their projects!
- parametrek 9y agoI've mentioned this before [1] but affiliate sites work, particularly if you are already doing web dev. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14473272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14473272
- tmnvix 9y agoNot necessarily passive, but an idea I was reminded of recently might be worth pursuing. Matching students with exam proctors. Online education is the future (and to a large extent the present!). A common requirement for students is to find an exam proctor. I had to do this myself. I was lucky enough to know someone that qualified (a high school teacher) but a lot of people won't. Googling for a proctor service didn't help much. There's an obvious need there.
- satya71 9y agoThe easiest way to find proctors is at http://www.ncta-testing.org/ http://www.ncta-testing.org/ . Typically they are locate at community colleges and universities.
- tmnvix 9y agoShould mention this was in Australasia (NZ and then Australia). Besides, even here there are a lot of people that qualify (anyone that works as an administrator at a university for instance). The thing is, there isn't much in the way of structured services (unless you happen to be doing a large certification course where others nearby also are).
- rasmafazi 9y agoI have made way more money from my bitcoin capital gains than from anything else I did for the last 3 years.
- hueving 9y agoCongrats, but that's like mentioning that you happened to be a snapchat employee or you won the lottery. It's useless advice for someone looking for ideas now.
- koonsolo 9y agoAre you sure it's useless? Ethereum seemed to have a jump recently, and maybe Monero is just in front of a jump. I don't know why the original post got down-voted. Crytocurrency is still in its infancy. Much money can be made from it. And it definitely qualifies as "passive".
- averagewall 9y agoEarly bitcoin winners had the advantage of hardly anyone knowing about or understanding what it was. So they had a kind of inside knowledge within the group of people who understood it enough to imagine the potential. Now, everyone (ie professional investors) knows about cryptocurrency so you have no advantage over them and you're just gambling.
- koonsolo 9y agoIt was always gambling, especially at the start. Bitcoins are still making major gains at the moment. Here's a strategy that works: Take an amount of money that you own but can miss. This means that you won't go totally crazy when you lose it all. Put that amount in Bitoin, Ethereum and Monero for example. Let it sit there for the next 10 years. In 10 years, it's either $0 and you lost it all, or it became the best investment you ever did. And that is counted in factors, not percentages. Worked out so far.
- hueving 9y ago
- bikamonki 9y agoAside from the obvious: code something that solves a real problem, you need someone to go out and sell it. Make him/her a partner/founder. That formula worked for me.
- sayelt 9y agoInvest in a cryptocurrency like bitcoin.
- gsylvie 9y agoIf you're in tech, you've probably used an Atlassian product (e.g., JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket). Make an Atlassian add-on! It's been a (mostly) solo gig for me so far. Two months ago my own add-on happened to do $8K in sales within a 30-day window. That put me around the 150th position on this ranking (add-ons ranked by last 30 days of sales): https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/top-selling https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/top-selling
- Romajashi 9y agoThat's turned out to be effectively a waste of time for me.
- seanjregan 9y agoNiiiiice one. They don't all make money but there has been around $225-250m in revenues in the marketplace so someone is making money.
- gsylvie 9y agoOh you work at Atlassian! I wonder if the PR I recently had accepted into "Auto Unapprove Plugin" will affect you! (I get the sense Atlassian uses that add-on internally). https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/stash-auto-unapprove-plugin/commits/all https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/stash-auto-unapprove-plugin/... (Issue #15 in particular - base unapprove on: git diff target...source | git patch-id).
- verigit 9y agoIf you are not a web developer you may consider building an app. I find the Mac App Store to be less competitive than the iOS one. Personally, I released my app two months ago: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/easygit/id1228242832?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/easygit/id1228242832?mt=12
- geekme 9y agoI am iOS developer and it has become a pretty tough market to crack. Can you share some more thoughts on the MAc App store. Is it worth investing in Mac app development?. Thanks.
- verigit 9y agoAnecdotally it seems like the Mac App Store is easier to break into and generate a steady income, at least for a while. Not sure if it is because of less competition, or just mac users being more willing to spend money for apps than iOS users. Keep in mind though that the market is at least one order of magnitude smaller than the iOS Store, so it may be more difficult to go further than side-project level.
- geekme 9y agoThank you
- noobieberry 9y agoWhat do you think about it revenue-wise? Are you pulling decent money from the MAS?
- WA 9y agoThe thing with passive income is: You only get to passive income if you love to work on a specific problem. I think, most solo founders who are successful today didn’t do it for the money. They found a problem and wanted to work on it, regardless of the payoff. Sure, a nice payoff would’ve been great, but that wasn’t the initial motivation. I think the psychological aspects are vastly underestimated when people try to find ideas for a business. There’s a reason why startup land says don’t make a fuzz about ideas. Few people are interested in implementing solutions for problems that they don’t care about. Caring about the problem helps a lot to get through times when it all seems too much and you still don’t see any success. I enjoy reading those idea lists, but I never implemented one and I think they’re worthless mostly, because there’s no emotional involvment from me.
- bigiain 9y agoNot sure that's iron-clad true - I doubt patio11 "loved working on" Bingo cards or appointment reminders, and I'm reasonably sure neither were problems he was trying to solve for himself.
- WA 9y agoBetter ask him, but I suspect he did enjoy it to some extend. I doubt he did it only as a money grab, but rather because of some interest in the problem. Maybe not the domain of bingo cards itself for too long, but everything else that comes with that: writing, explaining the product to teachers, SEO, marketing, customer support, automating everything.
- patio11 9y agoThere were probably higher-productivity ways to get money than writing bingo card creation software for elementary schoolteachers. To put it mildly. I didn't have "an itch" for either problem myself but I did really, really love throwing myself into learning how to run a business. BCC felt like a relatively low-risk way to do that. (AR didn't ever feel particularly low-risk -- and the stresses implied by that are one reason why I'm glad I don't run it anymore -- but that is neither here nor there.)
- chvid 9y agoI had some passive income sources earlier but they all did not last forever and they took a lot of work to setup plus a quite a few never made any income. Don't fall for the ease implied by the word passive. This is a concept designed to sell self help books and promote gurus. What you can do as a software developer to make money requires effort and chasing something that does not is fooling oneself. A better perspective is to ask what can I do to generate the most income; and maybe put up with a bunch of obvious and boring answers.
- bbayer 9y agoYou can find lots of ideas just checking http://flippa.com http://flippa.com You can even buy an established website from there and try to grow revenue but it would be wise to be careful about metrics provided by sellers though.
- dang 9y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?query=passive%20income&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=passive%20income&sort=byDate&d...
- patrickk 9y agoPassive bitcoin lending, and bitcoin secured lending. You can partially automate it, there are scripts on github to automatically manage your lending. You are exposed to the full volatility of crypto price swings though.
- alienjr 9y agoOpen a cheap investment account (e.g. Interactive Brokers) and invest in cheap ETFs (e.g. Vanguard Total World Stock and/or Vanguard Total Bond Market - in proportions 70%/30%) until you have 25*your yearly expenses (that usually means 10-12 years of investing, when you save 50% of your salary). After that point, you're FI, you can withdraw (max) 4% a year and live off from returns from your investments ad infinitum.
- brobinson 9y agoI am following a similar strategy, but I am invested in other instruments, too. I have everything from bond ladders to leveraged REITs. I invest 65% of my post-tax income and 100% of post-tax bonuses. I use Schwab, though. Schwab is now beating Vanguard on fees on their equivalents of Vanguard funds: https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/nn/m/indexfunds.html?van=tqn https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/nn/m/indexfunds.html?va... Schwab also just recently lowered its commissions... a lot. Equities trades are now $4.95 flat whether you buy or sell 1 share or 1,000,000 shares. Fidelity also lowered their commissions to match Schwab. Everyone else is still higher, including IB depending on your volume. (Disclaimer: no relation to Schwab other than that I am an extremely happy customer)
- averagewall 9y agoWork in some unrelated industry and find out enough to know their problems then make a web app that helps them. With businesses or professionals as customers, you can charge much more and with such a uncrowded niche, you can do a relatively poor job. An example, I've seen is a site for property managers to share information with their landlord customers. It's just a CRUD app with a list of transactions, area to post pdfs of invoices, etc. The web app is old, ugly and basic but I bet they're collecting big regular subscription payments from their customers who can't justify hiring their own web developer and building and maintaining their own site. The key here is having knowledge that most web developers don't have. It's going to be an uphill battle trying to sell golf clubs or restaurant bookings or solve any problems that everybody and their dog understands.
- malmsteen 9y agohow's that passive ?
- lukaslasso 9y agoI would also recommend affiliate marketing. Easiest to start because you don't need a huge investmemt to get started etc. Check out http://marketingonlinecentral.com/internet-jetset-review/ http://marketingonlinecentral.com/internet-jetset-review/ Hope this helps you out!
- MrMoenty 9y ago
- MrMoenty 9y ago,
- soft_dev_person 9y agoOT, but could the [dupe] tag become a link to the duplicate topic or something? It's usually in a comment somewhere, but would be nice with the official explaination/cause somewhere consistent.