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Ask HN: What is your passive income 2019?
Time to ask again :)
Any side projects, Games, OSS.
- dillmac 7y agoStart amazon affiliate site
- vital101 7y agoKernl (https://kernl.us https://kernl.us) - WordPress Plugin/Theme Updates, Git Deployment, Analytics, Load Testing, etc. Currently around $1200/month with fairly linear growth. It's a fun project to work on and I get to make money on the side for doing it.
- eganist 7y agoThis seems to be more active than passive.
- 0x0100 7y agoI am working on Mascot Gaming Logo Maker (https://mascotlogomaker.com https://mascotlogomaker.com). It's a tool that allows you to create a gaming logo for your esports team. As of now I have private beta testers using it and while it's not enough to call passive it sure pays for some video games gg.
- thoughtpalette 7y agoGreat idea. I have a friend that just created an eSports team logo, would've loved to share this with them if it was up.
- mdorazio 7y agoSame as last year. High-dividend stocks and ETFs. Everything else (including my rental property) is a lot less "passive" than most people think.
- Blackstone4 7y agoMy personal opinion is that retail investors love dividend stocks and they are more expensive than non-dividend stocks. Further to this, I have strong preference for firms which re-invest their cash flow resulting in capital gains which is much more tax efficient than a dividend.
- zer0tonin 7y ago> My personal opinion is that retail investors love dividend stocks and they are more expensive than non-dividend stocks. This is absolutely not true, there's plenty of stocks around here with low P/E ratio and dividends. You just have to look outside of tech to find them.
- twobat 7y agoExamples?
- starlightfury 7y agoSTWD
- hrez 7y agoit's REIT, with all the tax etc implications
- tres 7y agokr & wba are two that have what I consider a good P/E and a good dividend.
- Blackstone4 7y agoI made a generalization so there will be counter examples and I appreciate that some stocks/sectors will have attractive dividends. I would put REITs in the expensive dividend-focused sector... The main issue I have with a dividend paying stock is that they pay corporation tax and then I pay income tax on the dividend....with a group which re-invest its earnings, I do not pay income tax on that and if I need cash, I can sell stock and pay capital gains tax at a lower rate. The main issue with dividend stocks is that when the dividend gets cut there's forced seller by the dividend ETFs and stared retail investors so the drop in share price gets exacerbated which is unfortunate.
- tempsy 7y agoInvesting in boring index funds has produced 20% returns this year. Can't imagine it will happen again next yr but who knows. Actually I had an allocation in Apple which has had a crazy year..up 60% or so to all time highs.
- rinchik 7y agocurious, do you count unrealized gains as income as well? I also did some passive index fund investments but I only count cash dividends as actual "income".
- tempsy 7y agoI am in this case..I don't really day trade, have dividends auto-reinvested and rarely sell. The market does sort of concern me right now though. We're sitting at all time highs for the S&P but there's worrying signs everywhere. I don't know how it'll all play out next year, so I might gradually sell some to lock in gains before end of year.
- rinchik 7y agointeresting, I don't auto-reinvested my dividends, I use those to slowly but surely diversify my portfolio with different companies and industries (which is still a reinvestment I guess) It's kinds interesting and even exciting to "shop" for new investment opportunities when dividends are posted. agree about the market and all time highs and it feels dangerous. The thing is that no one can really predict what will happen, the only decent advice is, again, to diversify? Diversify with assets outside of the regular market fluctuations, e.g with cash savings, real estate, precious metals
- etrautmann 7y agoonly do this if you need the money < 5 years. Timing the market is not possible, and while I agree many troubling signs, it's impossible to time when to buy back in, and you lose dividends and potential gains during the time on the sidelines. If you need the money short term, then it shouldn't be invested in equities.
- CamelCaseName 7y agoI'd consider my work as an Amazon 3P Seller as semi-passive. It's been my "side hustle" for 2+ years now, with 2019 at $40K in YTD earnings. (Inclusive of all costs except my own labor, which I do not track) AMA?
- zorked 7y agoGrowing, stable or declining?
- CamelCaseName 7y agoStable or slightly declining, but that is a personal choice I made as I focused on my career. Unlike many, I don't update or A/B test anything after a product launch, so once a product is out launched, it's done from my perspective. With some more effort, I could be growing, either by launching new products (last product launch was in February) or by starting up my ad campaigns again (I cancelled most of them in April to improve profitability at the cost of slower turnover). I was let go about two weeks ago, if I can't find anything I love working on, I'll take this full time and (hopefully) go back to growing.
- jvagner 7y agoAre you selling a product you found and posted to Amazon, or did you create/assemble an FBA pack? My partner and I have two related product assemblages that we think are under-represented on Amazon, but for which we think we've identified a reasonable demand.. and for which content/instruction/information are not consolidated/accessible.
- CamelCaseName 7y agoMore or less than former. Either I find something interesting, or I have someone reach out to either of my buying agents. We go back and forth a little if any packaging / product customizations are needed and go from there. I do offer two "FBA packs" for my own private labelled products but will not be restocking them when they sell out because of packaging challenges. One big issue is discoverability. You will always be outranked by the sole product(s) as that's what people will search for. Customer acquisition costs are the major piece that many new sellers miss, and can easily sink an otherwise great listing. That said, the great thing about selling on Amazon is the low barrier to entry. I would recommend you give it a shot and see if it works. Better yet, see if you can private label the product and have complete control over the packaging. (assuming branding is not an asset) Seriously, send in 5-15 units and see what happens.
- davismwfl 7y agoNot what you were looking for but real estate (mostly rental) has been and remains my primary passive income.
- turdnagel 7y agoYou don’t have to do work as a landlord?
- eganist 7y agoMany people can outsource to management companies that handle this for you in exchange for a percentage. I've seen averages around 10%, with some outliers (PenFed credit union I believe?) doing 7%.
- davismwfl 7y agoCorrect in my experience 10% is a good guideline. I actually set things up slightly different but essentially it follows the same process. I have service providers I negotiated and setup that manage different aspects for me, so most all I have to do is make an approval or call and I don't have to pay a percentage fee each month. I learned how to do this after I had a bunch of properties in the past and was paying 8-12%/month in fees for each property but all they were doing was making calls on my behalf or setting up service providers to do it. Once I figured that out, I setup all my own service providers once and cut out the management fee. There are even people that cover the stuff like evictions etc as a service so you don't have to be involved on it. It requires maybe a few hours of my personal time every couple of months as an average.
- southphillyman 7y agoDo you have any advice on finding service providers or contractors? It seems like it's mostly word of mouth but people with dependable providers/contractors don't want to lose them to other landlords or developers.
- ricky1477 7y agoSemi passive rental income - one unit. Looking to acquire more and retire in 4-5 years. =) failed at monetizing my side projects in a scalable way
- g2ah5z 7y agoSame, although I have four rental units and one AirBnB. I wasted years of my 20s trying to come up with a monetizable SaaS product until I realized that I could earn passive income through "boring" businesses like rental properties. Now that I've had a taste of passive income through real estate, I've come to despise the tediousness of writing software. I can barely bring myself to do it anymore now that I don't "need" the income from my job to survive. My plan is to keep acquiring rental properties over the next fews and then quit the tech industry for good once I have enough to live comfortably.
- sourc3 7y agoI am in a similar position and would like to know how you got started with rental units. Are you using a property manager like it was mentioned in a previous comment? Do you recommend AirBnB vs. long-term rentals?
- ricky1477 7y agoI used equity from my primary residence to finance my first investment, since I couldn’t find other means of financing. I don’t think my area would be good for AirBnb although I haven’t tried, should probably read more about it. I am doing everything myself for now, since I get better ROI, but will probably move to prpty mngmt once I have more properties.
- g2ah5z 7y agoI self-manage since my properties are in the same small city that I live in. It's not the much work. I love AirBnB but you have to be careful with it - a lot of towns and cities have outright banned short-term rentals or at least made it very difficult to operate them legally.
- Jleagle 7y agoGame DB (https://gamedb.online/ https://gamedb.online/) - I take data from Steam APIs and show it in a friendly format. I am currently losing money, but hope to change that soon.
- melenaos 7y agoIt would be great if it could help to find the next game, something like the most popular games or the trending games etc
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Jleagle 7y ago@melenaos Hi, I think the page you are looking for is here: https://gamedb.online/apps/trending https://gamedb.online/apps/trending. It could be more accurate with a higher sample rate, but would cost more.
- melenaos 7y agoAsked by your local Tax office.
- ganonm 7y agohttps://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/modularpro-level-design-151460 https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/mod... Launched this a few months ago. I've made about $14 a month. In terms of return on investment I would have been better picking up pennies in the street, but it was a fun side project. Also, haven't done any real marketing yet... All sales have been organic discoveries through Unity store.
- melenaos 7y agoLooks great! Good job, I don't have any clue what the unity already provides but the snapping and the flow that you created this house it really great. I was working on a Architecture building software long time ago and it was nothing close to that fun as i see here! Couldn't you use this plugin, the unity editor, a bunch of ready made objects, walls, doors, floors etc and bundle them into one autonomus executable and sell it?
- ganonm 7y agoThanks! Yes there are possibly applications in the architecture space but I'm not very familiar with it so it's not a priority right now.
- dsaavy 7y agoI run a business automation services site (https://www.mergeyourdata.com/ https://www.mergeyourdata.com/). Basically I build an automation for small businesses and schedule them to run. Took years of learning the ins and outs of the biggest pain point areas for businesses and the technical solutions that would solve those. The learning all pretty much took place at my regular day job and I was just able to expand on those lessons.
- matt2000 7y agoVery interesting. If you wouldn't mind sharing some more details: Are you receiving fairly steady order flow now? Where do most of your customers come from? Thanks!
- dsaavy 7y agoOrders come and go inconsistently since almost all of them come from referrals and/or organic site traffic. This does result in a wide range of requests which keeps things interesting. Basically all of the work is in the beginning then it’s just subscription based for the automation refreshes (or an agreed upon amount if services are continuously running) and any minor updates.
- zaidazmi 7y ago0
- clintonb 7y agoStock photography
- cabernal 7y agoHow did you get started with this? I remember reading somewhere that stock photography is a nickel-and-diming business given that almost anyone can produce a half decent picture with modern cameras.
- derwiki 7y agoI posted this as a top level response, but I've had far better luck getting money via Pixabay donations than I have on Shutterstock
- clintonb 7y agoBy no means am I making large amounts of money. I get about $1 per day from photos on Adobe Stock. I have a portfolio of about 300-400 images taken over the past 8 years. Every so often I’ll upload some new shots. About 1-2 times a year I’ll get a large buy (eg. $75+) from 500px, but I don’t upload there very often since they broke their Lightroom plugin.
- crusty511 7y agoWhy did you choose Adobe Stock? Are you uploading to any other stock agency?
- maxkwallace 7y agoI mean, it's worth asking, but anyone with a good niche would be smart to not post it publicly unless the benefits of publicity outweigh the risk of competition.
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y agoEh! Based on what I know of people, the odds of any competition are slim. The odds of any effective competition are slim to none. Most people are basically lazy and will talk a good game, but not actually do anything.
- chatmasta 7y agoSure. But most good passive income ideas are good because of how easy they are, and because they're the perfect size for a small market. Usually even one more competitor entering the market is enough to significantly disrupt them. If you are sitting on one of those, why would you post about it in an HN thread that will be archived and trawled by capable competitors specifically looking for ideas? If it only takes one competitor to disrupt your golden goose, why would you post about it here? While there are many interesting ideas in this thread, I expect there are a fair amount of people lurking with much more profitable and higher leverage products. So maybe just take the thread with a grain of salt and don't think of it representative of a ceiling on what's possible to build in 2019.
- drchewbacca 7y agoI invest in Tesla stock and it would be great if a lot of people could also agree that's a good idea :)
- bluGill 7y agoIf you have a good idea you already have a lot of competition. Bad ideas have no competition because they are bad ideas that return every few years to fail again.
- gitgud 7y agoI agree there's niche websites that generate tonnes of money and have been around for years but nobody really knows about them... And the webmaster likes it that way
- welanes 7y agoNot exactly passive, but side hustle that I hope becomes main hustle: https://simplescraper.io https://simplescraper.io Tryna fill the gap that Kimono left. Aim to post as a Show HN once I polish it a little more.
- claytn 7y agoThis is awesome! Will give it a try sometime.
- tontonius 7y agoCool! Will bookmark this
- ghawkescs 7y agoThis looks really cool, I was disappointed when Kimono was shut down. Please reach out to me (email in profile), I would like to learn more about your product.
- jamil7 7y ago> Aim to post as a Show HN once I polish it a little more. Are you kidding? the home page at least looks really polished! great work.
- TheWizardofOdds 7y agoWould you mind sharing how you want to monetize this?
- derwiki 7y agoI post photos to pixabay.com and get Paypal donations
- jvagner 7y agoOf what.. and does it amount to much in $? Curious, because I've looked on pixabay for some things that were wildly under-represented, and I had half a thought to fill those gaps, mostly for fun and I'm... close to it.
- derwiki 7y agoJust the same landscape/architecture photography I do anyway. It's more than I made from Shutterstock. Probaly $100/year? So it's definitely on the level of "beer money." https://pixabay.com/users/derwiki-562673/ https://pixabay.com/users/derwiki-562673/
- crusty511 7y agoWhy have you chosen to upload photos to an "agency" that pays via donations? This doesn't seem like a guaranteed income for each photo that is licensed - particularly with the generous licence that pixabay places on each photo.
- bufferoverflow 7y agoThat's not passive. You're an unpaid content creator for PixaBay.
- niklabh 7y agoGithub sponsorship 750$ per month
- sellingwebsite 7y agoWhoa, that's great! What OSS projects do you work on?
- catacombs 7y agoCan you elaborate?
- driverdan 7y agoThat's not exactly passive.
- dglass 7y agoI run https://bannerjs.com https://bannerjs.com which is a configurable banner announcement service for websites that currently brings in $220 MRR. I also run https://www.junior-to-senior.com https://www.junior-to-senior.com which is a career advice newsletter for programmers that currently brings in $0 MRR, mainly because I'm focusing on content and growing the audience right now and haven't looked into sponsorships or paid subscriptions yet. I'd like to get it to a point where I can run it as a publication with multiple authors.
- rabbleroo 7y agoI work on a handful of different ecommerce sites for my day job. BannerJS looks like it could be useful when we run promos and sales across our sites. Thanks for sharing!
- lethologica 7y agoI've always been interested din how people monetize email lists. What's your plan? I see from the site at the moment it's just a sign up box. IS that what you intend on it being forever, or do you eventually plan to have other content like a blog on the site to pull organic traffic?
- petercooper 7y agoI started a company that publishes email newsletters, we now have about 10, and there are several of us in the company. We make 95% of our money through sponsorship/advertising in the newsletters.
- ericol 7y agoNot sure how to properly put an adjective to it, but I'm doing some side money on crypto trading. I started with a rather small amount of money (~0.15 btc) that grew to around ~0.21 in two months before the shitcoin I was playing with went literally to shit (They are not called shitcoins for nothing) and was left with around ~0.12. I'm testing the waters now with a more stable shitcoin. FWIW mine is (seems to be, at least) a very stable brute force approach. That I'll make no comments about ;) P.S.: I obviously have data to back up my claims - the transactions log of my crypto exchange account - but as well the "method" I'm employing can be inferred from there, as it's rather obvious.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gkoberger 7y agoI built an escape room! Startup Escape (https://startupescape.com https://startupescape.com), a parody of startups where you have "$1M to launch your startup" (1 hour to escape). It's a physical game in San Francisco, but it's run day-to-day by a manager. Overall it makes about $15k/mo, and after rent/labor/etc I just make a few thousand dollars a month.
- tpae 7y agoI love this! Will book it for our next team event
- zapstar 7y agoAwesome concept! Sounds like a great team-building activity.
- yellowapple 7y agoLooks fun. Might have to recommend it for a team offsite. But, um... > Startup Escape is in <strike>the Tenderloin</strike> North SOMA! The address is 447 O'Farrell St, San Francisco CA That's... literally the Tenderloin. Or is this (and the oxymoron that is "North SOMA") a joke that just went over my head? Haha.
- blankley 7y agoIt's a joke! :)
- gkoberger 7y agoA joke, of course!
- jaredsohn 7y ago"North SOMA" would mean "North South Of MArket" :) (For those not as familiar with San Francisco - SOMA is a neighborhood south of Market St. where a lot of tech companies in SF are found. Tenderloin is another neighborhood that has a reputation as the most dangerous in SF and is nearby but north of Market St.
- 7y ago
- demadog 7y agoRoughly $1,500 a month or so with a web hosting affiliate site - https://www.whatsthehost.com/ https://www.whatsthehost.com/ There's decent money to be made but a ton of competition, so for newbies I'd recommend easier niches to start!
- vforvinnie 7y agoThat's a great site! Every now and then I think about trying a hosting affiliate but it's so saturated.
- akudha 7y agoDo you actually sign up for these services and test them out? Or is there some other way to legitimately compare them? Asking because there are so many Amazon "affiliates" that just write reviews without ever trying the physical products. Not sure if this is the case with web hosting review sites though. 1500 is good amount, depending on the effort you put into it. Kudos!
- Sohcahtoa82 7y agoYour site breaks the use of my scroll wheel. Please don't try to implement custom scrolling methods in JavaScript. It never works properly on all platforms and just breaks things. It's also highly infuriating. EDIT: Here's some good rants on not messing with scrolling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883433
- geocrasher 7y agoI have a website that attracts about 100 unique visitors a day and it brings me <$100/mo via Amazon Affiliate. Getting bigger than that requires a lot more traffic, which requires doing things like SEO research and marketing work which I'm generally too lazy to learn how to do.
- twobat 7y agoFor 3000 visitors/month Amazon pays $100? That seems quite a waste.
- loktarogar 7y agotraditional ads would earn maybe $7-15 on that amount in most categories
- geocrasher 7y agoNot a waste. Last month I got 2800 uniques, 5300 views, and made about $50. The thing is, The blog is there anyway. It's truly passive income.
- twobat 7y agoWell, I meant waste on Amazon side. But I guess all that money is paid by the consumer of those products.
- Havoc 7y agoThat's promising. Been meaning to set up something similar - with modest targets (<100) The whole one income stream thing is starting to worry me out of principle rather than $$$.
- abadar 7y agoI sell a web service that randomly texts your kids to call you. Or reminds you to call your parents. https://www.callyourmomanddad.com https://www.callyourmomanddad.com
- xtracto 7y agoPlease avoid clicking on the link until later... apparently it is getting hammered right now.
- abadar 7y agoI'm new to hyperlinking on HN. My apologies.
- nbe 7y agoAnd what's your passive income?
- abadar 7y agoPeople buy a subscription to get/give reminders to call their parents. Every first Saturday of the month I schedule 8-12 texts per US time zone.
- derwiki 7y agoIf you don't mind sharing, what's the rough size of your active customer base? Thanks in advance!
- SaxoAnglo 7y agoDo people actually buy your service though? Can you share some numbers, am slightly skeptical about this idea but maybe am wrong...?!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- smcameron 7y ago$25/month from Patreon for a very niche open source game. Not exactly passive, except that I was doing it already anyway, might as well have a Patreon for it. (https://spacenerdsinspace.com https://spacenerdsinspace.com)
- jcmontx 7y agoWow, how many hours have you put into building this? And you are doing it all for free? OSS developers are the carries of our civilization.
- smcameron 7y agoNo idea how many hours, but coming up on 7 years in November. There's a long thread on freegamedev.net chronicling more or less the entire process. It starts off really simple and stupid, and then it just keeps going and going. https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3710 https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3710 I'm doing it for free because it's essentially my hobby project. It's fun.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- typpo 7y agoI have an outgoing SMS API called Textbelt (https://textbelt.com/ https://textbelt.com/). Kinda like Twilio but with flat pricing, smaller SMS packages for hobbyists, no dependencies, and allows 1 free SMS per day (good for crons or alerts). I also run QuickChart, an API for generating embeddable chart images and QR codes (https://quickchart.io/ https://quickchart.io/). QuickChart is fully open source, Textbelt has an open source version. Not always passive but they don't take much time. Combined they fund my non-mortgage spending.
- radicalriddler 7y agoDamn, I've been looking at building an app that requires SMS messaging. I'll give yours a look over before going straight to Twilio. A bit annoying that I have to give an email address to get a key, just to get pricing info though.
- typpo 7y agoThere is a pricing link up top that goes straight there, but I'll add a link by the Generate Key CTA to make it clearer. I've also realized that mobile phones don't see the navbar link. Oops! Thanks for the feedback.
- blackswan101 7y ago--Tried selling coffee online - failed- margins too low -CCA too high --Real estate multifamily (8units) - once deferred maintenance is taken care of, will be profitable --Looking for a pain point in my companies product marketing department that I can solve and productize
- wolco 7y agoIs anyone still making ad revenue?
- stevekemp 7y agoI used to run an online forum, showing google adverts. I also had a couple of them dotted around the most popular pages on my personal website. I set them up years ago and averaged about £80/month. I was just thinking a couple of months ago that I'd not seen any "You've got payment" emails. So I went to check on my account, and despite serving a ton more traffic these days advert revenue just dropped through the floor. I guess it is adblockers which killed the income for me. Anyway it was nice while it lasted, and I figured I'd just remove the adverts to increase page load-times. I suspect if you have more niche content, or more tightly integrated adverts than Google Adwords you could probably still do OK. But adblockers really did rise from nowhere to become extremely common.
- camilleroux 7y agoI built MerciCookie (https://www.mercicookie.com/ https://www.mercicookie.com/) an API to send cookies to customers, partners... I'm in France but we can send cookies in all Europe, US...
- nbe 7y agoAs per the title, what's your passive income?
- tonixie 7y agoI built a portfolio management tool for cryptocurrency investors. I was able to get to $2k MRR in the first month with a MVP without quitting my job. Here’s how i did it: https://www.hodlbot.io/blog/zero-to-two-thousand-mrr-in-one-month https://www.hodlbot.io/blog/zero-to-two-thousand-mrr-in-one-...
- pavelmark 7y agoHonestly it's not sexy but https://incomedata.org https://incomedata.org and https://nsndb.com https://nsndb.com. Simple data backed sites. They end up being pretty fun to make and useful for specific people.
- nihlaak 7y agoThis is really fun. I just spent ten minutes looking through zip codes I've lived in and the "interesting" ones you linked. Do you make money from it? I don't see any ads or information on payment.
- xcubic 7y agoI noticed the latest data is from 2017. Is the data after that not available or you lost interest on the website?
- yboris 7y ago$250/month this year -- I created Video Hub App as a personal project that became good enough to share with others. Nearing 1000 purchases since its launch (1.5 years ago), earned about $3500 (just about all went to my favorite cost-effective charity, Against Malaria Foundation). Released version 2 a few weeks back and had about 100 sales this month -- perhaps over the years it will earn a lot more. Was averaging about $250/month this year. https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/
- unixhero 7y agoI was selling computer chips, old but still valuable for resale in my local market. Had to stop due to new restrictions on imports, namely elimination of tax floor for imports. Now everything is getting taxed, and that means my margins are gone. It was fun while it lasted, I had about 10k USD Per year in profits , used it for beer and travel money. I would do personal deliveries in bakeries, and only bakeries. My alarm would blare reminding me of making a delivery with the message "Chips at the bakery". I would also do shipping with snailmail, but I enjoyed the personal encounters.
- dbetteridge 7y agoLemme guess , Aussie GST changes?
- unixhero 7y agoUmm, not quite. But let's say just say it's the same OECD bracket.
- dbetteridge 7y agoFair enough! They started charging the 10% on all imports recently, which I know killed a few peoples side import/resales
- Schweigi 7y agoCurrently i have mainly two different passive income streams. A side project and multifamily property investments. My side project (https://www.teamcalapp.com https://www.teamcalapp.com) returns around $2500/month and growing. I think the main improvement to be done is doing more marketing, which is unfortunately not so passive. Im also investing in apartment complexes. Right now i have 4 passive investments. Since I’m only a passive LLC member that income is truly passive. Those investment deliver nice regular cashflow (8-10%) and appreciation once sold. Right now I’m in the process of buying my own property together with friends (50-80units). That will then be a bit more work but still partially passive once all is setup with the property management company.
- wait-a-minute 7y agoSilly question, but how will your product survive if Google decides to just implement that type of view on the calendar?
- Schweigi 7y agoGood question! The lack of this feature was why I made TeamCal because Microsoft has it already a long time in Outlook. It doesn’t seem that Google invests a lot in Google Calendar improvements, especially for B2B use cases. Thats why I’m not overly worried.
- snisarenko 7y agoGoogle has neglected their calendar product for almost a decade. I wouldn't be too concerned.
- deanmoriarty 7y agoWould you be willing to share the name of the sponsors you invest with in the LLC? I am interested in doing the exact same and am an accredited investor, but I don't want to invest in the fundrise.com of the day, what they offer seem very "bottom of the barrell". I would rather find some sponsor who would like accept a more limited number of accredited investors with whom to build a long-lasting relationship (ideally for decades and many deals), and in exchange I would be happy to invest larger sums of money (e.g. 50-100k per deal?). I am asking because, if you are contemplating buying your own apartment complex, you definitely know what you're talking about and might be able to give me some very valuable advice :-)
- bonoboTP 7y agoFollowup question (if allowed). If your passive income involves software and you're also employed at a software company, how do you deal with the potential legal problems? Most contracts don't allow for commercial side projects and the company owns anything you create even outside of working hours. Do people just keep quiet and not tell their employer? How risky is it? I know some people who simply don't bother telling their employer (and may or may not pay taxes, too), but I guess you can only do this up to a certain point.
- driverdan 7y ago> Most contracts don't allow for commercial side projects and the company owns anything you create even outside of working hours. Those are terrible terms. You should never sign something like that.
- jakenberg 7y agoAnd that rarely holds up in court, especially in California. Some common sense comes into play e.g. if you're building a direct competitor or using their IP, then of course that's going to be an issue.
- dctoedt 7y ago> And that rarely holds up in court, especially in California. Flowchart to help determine employer ownership of inventions: https://www.oncontracts.com/docs/Who-owns-an-employee-invention.pdf https://www.oncontracts.com/docs/Who-owns-an-employee-invent... (from 2010; annotated w/ citations to state statutes) (self-cite). EDIT: Ownership of copyright in an employee-created "original work of authorship" will depend on the facts. Here are a couple of cases: CASE 1: (A) The employee-author acted "within the scope of employment" in creating the work, AND (B) the employer and employee do not have an agreement altering ownership. RESULT 1: Under 17 U.S.C. 201(b), the employer owns the copyright in the work. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/201 CASE 2: (A) Employee-author did not act "within the scope of employment" in creating the work, AND (B) the employer and employee did not have an agreement governing ownership of the work. RESULT 2: Under 17 U.S.C. 201(a), the employee owns the copyright in the work. Note that calling something a "work made for hire" doesn't automatically make it one — the work must fit into one of nine statutory categories [0], AND the parties must agree, before the work is created, that the work will be a work made for hire. [0] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Community_for_Creative_Non-Violence_v._Reid https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Community_for_Creative_Non-Viole...
- jawns 7y agoMy first book was published six years ago. The title is in my profile, if you're willing to click through for the plug. It has continued to sell well, and about two years ago I "earned out," meaning my royalties exceeded my advance, so now every six months I get a royalty check. I've also agreed to several deals that allow my book to be translated and sold in different countries. Those deals are usually on the small side, but the only work involved is picking up a pen and signing the paperwork. The success of that first book has allowed me to write several related books, and while the advances I've received for those don't count as passive income, my hope is that they will generate some passive income in the future, if I should be so fortunate as to earn out again. To anyone who is thinking about writing a book, I offer this advice: There are some cases where it makes sense to self-publish even if you can get a book deal. Niche e-books on technical topics written by people with large built-in audiences are one example. But in general, if you can get an agent, get an agent, and if you can get a book deal, get a book deal.
- twox2 7y agoCongrats. FYI - there are a bunch of dead links on the correlated dot org site in the footer.
- amerkhalid 7y agoThat is amazing, I have gifted your first book, "Experimenting With Babies" to almost all of my friends who had babies. Going to buy "Experimenting With Kids" now.
- qwtel 7y agoI sella boutique Jekyll theme for software folks and academics which makes about $400/month. The base version is free, maybe somebody here likes it too: https://hydejack.com/ https://hydejack.com/
- mtlynch 7y agoI used your theme for a blog I ran for a few months last year: https://blog.spaceduck.io/ https://blog.spaceduck.io/ Thanks for creating it!
- technotarek 7y agoWhat are we calling "passive" these days? Is there a notion about the amount of (ongoing) sweat equity/maintnence to payout we all have in mind? The original notion seems unlikely ==> finish initial work/build and then just sit back and collect checks. Seems like few of the projects posted so far, if any, meet that high bar. Realistically there is almost always ongoing maintenance, and if it comes from a passion, probably also constant tinkering and improvement. I've definitely got one of those -- I can't let it sit long enough to ever call it fully passive :)
- nishmastime 7y agoUsually it just means recurring revenue in general with relatively little work involved.
- zapstar 7y agoI'm working on a website that calculates the unit prices on Amazon products. Hoping to help save people some money, since there are a surprising amount of times where buying in smaller quantities actually saves you money. The website is https://unitprice.org/browse https://unitprice.org/browse if anyone is interested! It's still very much in its infancy, but I plan on doing a "Show HN" soon! Based on the last two weeks, I have only made about $10, but that's been with very little traffic so far.
- imedadel 7y agoI thought Amazon does show you the unit prices?
- zapstar 7y agoGood question. Sometimes Amazon does, and sometimes Amazon does not, even within the same product category. Or sometimes it will mix and match the unit. For example, sometimes they will provide the price per ounce for K-cups, and other times, it will provide the price per cup. Not very useful when wanting to do a comparison. For each of these items that I list, I have manually audited the unit count (after usually automatically doing an initial guess). For many, there's not even an automatic guess, so I have to read the description, look at the photo, etc., in order to determine the unit count.
- PhrosTT 7y agoDo paper towels & toilet paper please :)
- zapstar 7y agoI will! Thanks for the suggestion! I have heard that from some friends as well.
- zapstar 7y agoI've added some initial paper towel and toilet paper listings, FYI! More to come, so expect an even better deal later this evening! https://unitprice.org/categories/home https://unitprice.org/categories/home
- michlsemn 7y agoI've released two SQL courses on DataCamp, which bring in a nice sum every quarter.
- Anon84 7y agoNot exactly passive, but... I teach online webinars/in person tutorials on the basics of Data Science and ML with Python: https://www.data4sci.com https://www.data4sci.com Started beginning of the year and hoping to make it to $20k
- dmh2000 7y agoSocial Security + about $100 a year from an oil royalty i inherited
- 2025 7y agoI sell/invest in Pokemon/Magic the Gathering/Yugioh Cards. It's some work to keep up to date with prices, managing the online store / in person matters. But it's a fun hobby and I've made lifetime friends as well.
- jb3689 7y agoThe market for these is hot but I would generally not call it passive. Timing is critical on many cards and offloading them can be nontrivial. I do this lightly as well, mostly for fun
- tonystubblebine 7y ago$80/month. Regular Expression Pocket Reference for O'Reilly. 1st edition in 2003, 2nd edition in 2006. $1k/month Medium back catalog. I moved everything I've ever written behind Medium's paywall and took out any CTAs so that I'd qualify for distribution inside their algorithm.
- imroot 7y agoI do microlending through Lending Club, own a Pawn shop (which is managed day-to-day by someone else), and own a Great Clips (Sounds silly, but, again, managed by someone else).
- awinder 7y agoI’ve become increasingly curious about things like owning a ____ franchise (mostly from watching this fantastic location by my house go through a revolving door of poorly-run franchises and wondering “I bet you could make some money if you just ran the place right”). So this doesn’t sound silly to me in the slightest. But I am curious if you would indulge my curiosity, how’d you come to decision to pursue such investments and what’s it been like to own it?
- imroot 7y agoI just know that I needed to diversify what I had -- and, it was between buying a Great Clips franchise or opening up a pizza joint.
- sh87 7y agoMy conversation about owning a similar "utility" store with SO came to grinding halt at "We'll talk once you find someone who's actually done this". Well, now I do! Thank you ! Would you please share some details; how you started, what it took time and money wise, what to avoid, what really matters. It may seem silly to you but I really need this. I'm willing to communicate offline/in-person/chat/phone whatever works for you. You will not believe how hard it is to find someone who's done what you have.
- xur17 7y agoHow did you get into the second 2? I've always been curious about purchasing a physical, but never known how one goes about it.
- imroot 7y agoThe Pawn shop was my Father-In-Law's idea, but, it requires a LOT of paperwork (including getting your FFL Type 2), a lot of regulatory stuff (retaining DL's and video on all transactions, reporting to regional fusion centers), and a lot of time (it was probably 18 months before we were profitable). The Great Clips was just a chance thing -- Sport Clips didn't seem like it was up my alley, and it's also located in Eastern Kentucky, where not a lot of people go for $70+ haircuts. Existing owner wanted out of his franchise agreement, and I was more than happy to purchase it from him. Eventually, I might try to market and sell the Pawn Shop's POS that I wrote for it, but, that's years down the road.
- vforvinnie 7y agoWhile in college I started a price comparison site for textbooks (https://www.affordabook.com https://www.affordabook.com) that generates affiliate income. Back in the day it generated great income and warranted full time work, but these days it still generates some solid passive income. A lot of the traffic is from SEO, but we still have a small social presence and a healthy amount of repeat visitors.
- k__ 7y agoI sell about 2-4 books a month.
- treyfitty 7y agoI’ve posted about it before, but since it’s being asked again: It’s not “tech” and it’s refreshing to build something from scratch that’s very tangible. I want to walk away from data science and create something that allows me to open a store selling lifestyle products for men one day. To this end, I launched a men’s skincare line about 3 months ago (https://www.mendskin.co https://www.mendskin.co) which isn’t “successful” yet, but it’s my first experience selling physical goods and I think these things take time. Right now, I spend about 10 hours per week on Ads, customer service, and fulfillment. So, it’s kinda passive. “Beauty products” (for lack of a better term) definitely require heavy capital, and it’s becoming hard to do everything by myself. All the individual things that need to be done aren’t hard- it’s just that there’s so much to do in order to deliver successful physical products. But I enjoy it.
- thecupisblue 7y agoWow! I'd love to read a blog about this and the whole process, any hope for something like that?
- treyfitty 7y agoDefinitely... I just didn’t think people would be interested :) I have an interview with a publication coming up. After that publishes, I’ll post a link and talk about things in much more detail.
- mrblues 7y agoI can offer a way to generate passive income. I have a software consultancy (among our clients are Fiverr, Intel and HP software) and I pay about 2000$ per month as finders fees for referring software consulting leads. What you need to do is to ask your software developer friends if their company is looking to hire a contractor. When I sign the contract I pay a nice monthly finder's fee. Contact me for more details if it sounds interesting to you. My contact details in my profile..
- shanecleveland 7y agoHave some small sites that have generated a few hundred each month from ads that continue to do well. I don't have to do anything with them. But I have started to double-down on some of these successes by offering some paid SAAS options around them. After an initial push, I hope they will mainly be passive, as well. The free sites serve as the lead generation. So I am OK with them growing organically that way. It's slow, but easy. If one shows more promise or potential than others, perhaps I will put in more feature development or marketing efforts there.
- pseudozach 7y agoI've been running https://kriptode.com https://kriptode.com a bunch of services that run with Bitcoin on Lightning. Most popular is http://sats4likes.com http://sats4likes.com where you can earn/pay Bitcoin for twitter likes. It's not exactly passive or profitable but I learned a lot.
- dhruvkar 7y agoI invest in large industrial real estate ($2-10M) with established tenants (often publicly traded companies) in the Midwest with a group of other investors. It's kind of like Fundrise [0], but with a handful of people in a 2-3 deals a year. With ~180K invested, I'm around $1750/month in positive cash flow. 0. https://fundrise.com https://fundrise.com
- Ancalagon 7y agoNow this is really interesting to me. Just peeking at their website the returns data only goes back about 5 years. Aren't you concerned about losing that money if/when a recession occurs and big-business investment dries up?
- sprain 7y agoI run an independent, localized wedding registry platform. Couples pay a one-time activation fee. A friend and I built the site some years ago and never really changed anything. All we have to do is to reply to 1-2 support emails per month and keep Google ads running. On average it generates a profit of about 1,5k per month.
- cik 7y agoRunning the same passive project as 2017 - a day trading robot focused on Canadian (TSX) market conditions. It's been wildly successful closing positions on a nightly basis and exploiting market patterns that work at a scale that I care about. I spend almost zero maintenance time per month, less than 10 minutes per day interacting with it. It's also proved an excellent toy for me to constantly retool and play with new languages, frameworks, and databases. Couldn't be happier.
- Havoc 7y agoAnd that works? I had assumed the evil Goldmans of the world had thrown enough cloud power at everything to find ever free penny already
- cik 7y agoAbsolutely - rather predictably, but only within the segment I use. If you're an HFT trader you can't win. But if you have patterns you've noticed, can act on and encode... well quite frankly it's incredibly consistent on baskets of stocks (not daily), but very much based on a variety of characteristics. Over the last year I've met two to three traders (as in big bank) who literally do this for weeks.
- hsnewman 7y agoRetirement income + money market investment income. I've left the market, because I'm a pessimistic investor. I've sold my house and it too is in cash investments.
- jetti 7y agoI wrote a book several years ago and in the last year or so sales have exceeded the advance, so I get that income. It is no more than about $100 a year (if that) but it is something.
- ImpressiveWebs 7y agoMy primary frontend blog/website (https://www.impressivewebs.com/ https://www.impressivewebs.com/) is mostly passive, I post maybe one article per month, usually not even that much. The blog has been active for about 10 years, so I get lots of SEO traffic, which brings in about $400-500 per month. I also sell ebooks that are compilations of articles and tips from my newsletter (see below) on Leanpub and Amazon. (https://leanpub.com/b/javascriptdombundle https://leanpub.com/b/javascriptdombundle) My main newsletter (https://webtoolsweekly.com/ https://webtoolsweekly.com/) is now also a regular income stream (about $400-700 per month and growing), but not exactly passive. Takes regular research, writing, etc. But it’s fun to do and leads to all sorts of paid tech writing projects. Finally, my newest newsletter (https://techproductivity.co/ https://techproductivity.co/) is not yet making money but that’s starting to change as the subscription number has started to rise to a decent number and it’s very easy to write that one, maybe 2 hours of work per week.
- rhlsthrm 7y agoThis is awesome stuff. This is exactly the type of content I want to start creating (development blog, newsletters, etc). Do you think it's better to build your own blog site if you were starting now as opposed to using Medium or something?
- ImpressiveWebs 7y agoYes, I think your own site is best. You can do Medium too for promotional reasons but it’s good to have your own brand and own your own stuff.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Nadge 7y agoSpent an hour on impressivewebs.com before I realised! Great blog, thanks for sharing.
- ImpressiveWebs 7y ago
- kevinslin 7y agobuild https://backuptable.com https://backuptable.com. online backups for airtable. makes a few hundred dollars a month in subscriptions. built on aws and lambdas :)
- greeniron 7y agocannabis online store. my profit share currently nets me around than CAD10k per month. started about a year ago when a few friends pooled money together to take over a failing online cannabis store, which are not legal in Canada but are sort of outside of law enforcement interest currently so we operate pretty freely at this moment. i've always been keen to do this as i've heard how profitable it is, so when they asked me to manage all the computer stuff in exchange for a small profit share, i agreed. i had minimal experience with SEO, but learned along the way how to tweak little things here and there, like which types of promos worked, etc and managed to do a decent job in the end. it did require some work at the beginning but once most of the things were set in place, my role was reduced down to mostly designing promos and customer service, which i performed simultaneously at my full-time job which i maintained. the customer service largely involves me just engaging with customers on Discord and answering emails. it didn't start off 100% passive, and it probably still isn't considered passive, but i don't feel that i do much work for it now and i'm still getting paid roughly CAD10k. my next step is i'm in discussion with one of the partners to start up a new shop, this time as an owner.
- qot 7y agoWhat were some of your pain points in handling the tech? I've been toying with the idea of starting a cannabis software company to help people like you.
- deanmoriarty 7y agoA diversified portfolio of index funds. This year return so far is ~15% (which in absolute amounts is more than my after-tax salary, even after accounting for long term capital gains), and my annualized return since when I started investing (~a decade ago) is ~10%.
- bosephjangles 7y agoWhich index funds do you like? I've been going back and forth between considering one or more index funds or just getting a target date fund and leaving it alone altogether.
- deanmoriarty 7y agoI basically replicate a target date fund manually, using the standard Vanguard funds like VTI, VXUS, BND, ... That way, I can tune allocations if needed and I can take advantage of tax loss harvesting opportunities, so I get some extra benefits.
- travisr 7y agoAnd target dates usually have a higher expense ratio than funds like VTI. So you keep more of your investment income by doing it manually.
- ScottFree 7y agoAny thoughts on Michael Burry's index fund bubble?
- deanmoriarty 7y agoI basically plan on not ever selling for decades, so the volatility/liquidity issues that Burry was talking about that would happen if everyone tries to selloff at the same time don’t worry me too much: as long as I don’t sell, I believe things will recover just fine after a few months/years. I have enough invested in fixed income to being able to weather a very significant storm, including me losing my job for several years. If things don’t recover after that, then I think I will have much bigger problems than my investment portfolio.
- asmr 7y agoI made a twitter bot (@schumannbot) that posts the Schumann Resonance graphs from http://sosrff.tsu.ru/new/shm.jpg http://sosrff.tsu.ru/new/shm.jpg It gained close to 10k followers within a year. I started selling related T-Shirts, and make ~$60 a month. Nothing big, but it's beer money. I plan on expanding the related website and even starting a YouTube channel, but it's not exactly something I planned on monetizing.
- chrdengso 7y agoMade platform connecting DJs with events, everything is pretty much automated and I charge a commission on every booking. https://cueup.io/ https://cueup.io/
- seanwilson 7y agoI wrote a paid Chrome extension that tests websites for SEO, speed and security best practices: https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/ It currently has 30K active users of the free version and 100s of paid users.
- mmcwilliams 7y agoWhat kind of breakdown do you see between monthly and yearly subscriptions?
- seanwilson 7y agoAbout 30% for yearly and 70% for monthly. I'm still experimenting with the pricing plans. I only started the monthly plan recently. I had a quarterly plan in its place before which don't seem that common with other SaaS products. I found quarterly appealing in that it probably reduces billing related support requests, the higher price tends to attract customer that are less demanding in terms of product support, and customers aren't pressured to evaluate if they want to continue their subscription so often.
- mmcwilliams 7y agoVery interesting. It some kind of sense to me that the noisiest customers are those paying less, even if they're only making up something like 20% of actual MRR. Are a lot of the support requests related to yearly billing or do you mean a quarterly option would theoretically preempt those kinds of requests? Really great extension, site and all-around product, by the way.
- seanwilson 7y ago> It some kind of sense to me that the noisiest customers are those paying less, even if they're only making up something like 20% of actual MRR. Yep. Another factor is Checkbot covers a big range of website problems where the fixes for each vary a lot (where it's not possible to determine the source via web crawling) so noisy customers can have complex requests. For example, a bad redirect could be coming from Apache, Nginx, WordPress or cPanel settings. I get a lot of messages where someone is convinced Checkbot is wrong when it's actually correct too (e.g. people convinced their HTML is valid when it's not) which can generate bad reviews if you're not careful. > Are a lot of the support requests related to yearly billing or do you mean a quarterly option would theoretically preempt those kinds of requests? I mean each payment can prompt a support request so the more spread out the payments the less support requests. They're not super common, but they build up the more customers you get and I feel a sense of urgency to handle requests to do with payments. I think the longer billing periods let people relax more with evaluating the product too e.g. you're not thinking "I need to use this a lot right now because I've only got 30 days to decide if I use it enough to keep paying or not". > Really great extension, site and all-around product, by the way. Thanks, appreciated. :)
- TheGrumpyBrit 7y agoNot entirely passive, but I'm a Nominet registrar and buy/sell domains as my side gig. For the most part, this involves taking preorders for domains which have expired and are about to drop, then trying to catch them when they do. I also hold my own domain portfolio which currently consists of just over 200 domains. I generally have an idea for how to develop most of these, but I'm mostly just holding them until I get time to work on them. Depending on what's dropping, my earnings from the domain side can vary drastically. It usually covers its own costs, and my best month so far (I only started in April this year) earned me around £1000
- umen 7y agoMind u share how do u register the domains ? API ? Manual ?
- TheGrumpyBrit 7y agoA combination. For any preordered domains, I poll the domain until it drops and automatically register it using the API. Each day I'll review upcoming drops for the next day for anything I want to chase myself, and also review the drops from the previous day for any that weren't worth chasing but are worth manual registration.
- letitburn 7y agoI'm shorting the pound, waiting for brexit to happen already.
- udayrddy 7y agohttps://extracttable.com https://extracttable.com - started on Aug 26 ($1400 till date), injecting the revenue back in to it to release more services.
- softwarerero 7y agoMy wife and I make some money with a couple of cheap renting units. To make the administration work easier I started to write an application last year (https://adpro.sun.com.py/en https://adpro.sun.com.py/en). At first it was very Paraguay-specific so currently I'm working on the last part of internationalization which is the contract and invoice editor. From the start I integrated the ability to also administer renting units for others. It is very useful to us but I'm not sure about product/market fit. I'm eager to learn from others who rent out what they use for administration and such a system makes sense to them. If I really go after the idea I'll also need a co-founder, please contact me if you are interested.
- enjoyitasus 7y agoHave a SaaS product I built a few years back. Still churning and profitable but for a niche audience. Wanting to pick up another passive income stream.
- Byalpel 7y agoWith 2 friends, we have built a "pokemon-go" like platform, called https://geogaming.io https://geogaming.io, to create fully customisable scavenger hunts. We sell it mainly in B2B to companies who sell team building events and that need a touch of digital... We have other customer segments coming (zoos, theme parks, tourism offices...) We also use the platform for individuals,like for birthdays (http://birthdays.geogaming.io http://birthdays.geogaming.io) or hens/bucks parties etc. This platform brings us ~15k a month but it's growing very very fast. Our architecture is based on AWS lambdas so our infrastructure costs are very limited and the product is highly scalable (games have been played with thousands of players)... We are based in Sydney.
- znq 7y agoWe've built Bugfender 5 years ago as an internal tool at Mobile Jazz for solving our own need of iOS and Android debugging and remote logging. After the first 2 years or struggling we've now just crossed MRR $23k USD and the business continues to grow healthy with small and big customers. https://bugfender.com/blog/bugfender-growth-from-side-project-to-a-sustainable-20k-mrr-business/ https://bugfender.com/blog/bugfender-growth-from-side-projec...
- caspg 7y agoI released the initial version of https://datamaps.world https://datamaps.world at the beginning of September. So far I earned around 200$ from subscriptions and 100$ from selling the license to my datamaps chart library. I have a full-time job and I'm working on this project only in my spare time.
- rfdavid 7y agoI’m making around $1,500/month of passive income. Here is what it worked for me: I created a web tool for stock technical analysis but instead trying to acquire clients by myself, I contacted some players with a solid distribution channel who lacks some tools to sell. So I offered them white label to sell inside their website, splitting the profits by 50/50. No cost for me to acquire users, sales, marketing or even support. I believe it can work with any kind of product. Pretty much the same as selling your app in a marketplace, but I would say it is easier to sell having a brand on top of it.
- wgx 7y agoMyself and a buddy run: https://SQLizer.io https://SQLizer.io - migrate data in CSV, JSON, XML, etc into MySQL databases. It's doing ok, but growth is static and we've tried a lot of stuff. Feels like we're hitting the total available market for "people who want to convert to SQL".