7 ms·
Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
Any side projects, Game, OSS, Hacks.
- _kush 5y agoI have made a few iOS apps (Cone[0] and Unwind[1]) which generate enough to pay my bills. [0]: https://cone.app https://cone.app [1]: https://unwind.to https://unwind.to
- Jsharm 5y agoCone is one of the ideas where you think "How did I not think of that?" Awesome, congratulations!
- morgancmartin 5y agoCurious to know what kind of marketing efforts you took for these if any? Any marketing budget to speak of? They look like really well done apps, congrats on (kind of) exiting the rat race!
- captn3m0 5y agoCone was on Apple's Developer Spotlight recently[1,2], and was covered in other news subsequently[3]. Interesting to read the original Show HN from 2017[4]. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=1al00dn0 https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=1al00dn0 [2]: https://apps.apple.com/in/story/id1556285704 https://apps.apple.com/in/story/id1556285704 [3]: https://thehardcopy.co/the-indian-app-featured-at-apples-wwdc-2021/ https://thehardcopy.co/the-indian-app-featured-at-apples-wwd... [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14254357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14254357
- bwh2 5y agoLow cost index funds provided a 16% return in 2020 and require nearly zero effort.
- fny 5y agoThis is not passive income. This is asset appreciation. Dividends or rent collection qualify as passive income.
- nitsky 5y agoThese days, with stock buybacks, a portion of stock price increases are actually dividends.
- RivieraKid 5y agoIt's effectively the same.
- sethd 5y agoIt's only income if you sell, at which point it's no longer passive, right? Otherwise it's unrealized gains and not income.
- Retric 5y agoSetting up a passive income by regularly selling stocks clearly qualifies. Unrealized gains are more questionable, but you don’t have to realize gains from other forms of passive income like rental income either.
- nly 5y agoIt's really not. Let's say, thanks to your passive investment growth, you can spend 3% of your capital every year and never run out This means $100/mo of recurring, passive income would take $40K in the bank to replace. Even a small passive income is worth huge amounts.
- antb123 5y agounfortunately everything that is above 2% interest in our zero yield environment takes some risk. However I agree. Best for me is EU crowd funding sites for real estate. Typical yield is 12-20%. So called "Hard money". Banks in europe don't touch this after the 80s blow ups. Nexo - popular in the crypto world takes the funds and puts them there (but keeps 2-3%) as well as payday loans for eastern europeans.
- bradfields 5y agoI'm about £6 up from crypto
- vbtemp 5y agoMy best passive income is probably my day job, my investments require a lot more focus and time. Lol, guys, it's a joke.. kinda.
- enumjorge 5y agoHow is a day job passive income?
- amelius 5y agoProbably by reading HN all day ;)
- factorialboy 5y agoDepends on the intensity-level one puts in their 9 to 5.
- dygd 5y agoI think that it allows him to invest into passive index funds (no active trading) which hopefully appreciate over time.
- sithlord 5y agoI think they are really saying that because of their dayjob, they can invest - and then that generates passive income
- CountDrewku 5y agoMaybe he outsourced his job to foreign workers and watches cat videos all day like this dude- https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- killingtime74 5y agoVOO. SP500 ETF
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- domains808 5y agoDomain names, sales and traffic (PPC). Traffic (PPC): Approximately US$ 10K a month. You have to have names that have type in traffic. Sales: Not truly passive as we do reply to inbound inquiries and manage a sales pipeline. It's highly lucrative if you have .Com domains that businesses want.
- dukeofharen 5y agoI run and develop the trailer booking website for my fathers company. I earn based on the number of bookings. For some reason (possibly COVID) a lot of people moved so it was a very busy year, which means I got a nice little side income.
- Saphyel 5y agoTwitch, £2k this month. I'm planning to quit my job actually
- gravypod 5y agoHow do you make money on twitch? Programming streams?
- Saphyel 5y agoGaming most of the time but some times I do some personal talks/Q&A. It took me over 2 years to get here, so it's not easy.
- gtirloni 5y agoHow's that passive? Genuinely curious.
- Saphyel 5y agoit started with 1h or 2h getting 0, literally, it raised to £20 month after several weeks... and here we go.
- nfriend 5y agoA little art game I built for iOS and Android: https://inspiral.nathanfriend.io/ https://inspiral.nathanfriend.io/ (It's the mobile version of https://nathanfriend.io/inspiral-web/ https://nathanfriend.io/inspiral-web/)
- WildGreenLeave 5y agoWhile not entirely passive, I developed a SaaS[0] to scratch my own itch. As a freelancer I often use Asana[1] with clients but one serious missing feature is easy referable task IDs like Jira. (e.g. HN-123) Furthermore, having git commit messages as notifications in your tasks is also a really nice addition. So, meet Astogi[0]. Currently it isn't replacing my freelancing (yet) but it generates a small decent income which is for a big part passive. [0]: https://astogi.com https://astogi.com [1]: https://asana.com https://asana.com
- domains808 5y agobtw, its 2021.
- xondono 5y agoI'm guessing he is asking now because a lot of people have recently worked out their 2020 incomes statementes for tax purposes.
- skybrian 5y agoGoogle was up about 30%. I made most of my money by procrastinating about diversifying. (I believe in diversifying for the usual reasons and sometimes do it, but usually regret it in retrospect. Maybe someday I won’t regret it.) It looks like I will regret diversifying again this year.
- VoxelBoy 5y agoA mobile game I built in a few months last year: (Android) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.reckoning.carragdoll https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.reckoning.... (iOS, newly released) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sandbox-city/id1512598054 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sandbox-city/id1512598054 Brings in around 400 euros a month from ads and in-app purchase revenue.
- hanniabu 5y agoEthereum DeFi yield farming. Will be migrating funds to ETH staking soon for a nicely appreciating yield-bearing asset. Tips and MEV rewards will be the icing on the cake.
- Mooty 5y agoSelling few delivery plugins for woocommerce/prestashop was a really nice idea at the time which did not really work that much before pandemic (for ex https://codecanyon.net/item/stuart-for-woocommerce/25673890 https://codecanyon.net/item/stuart-for-woocommerce/25673890)
- dahx4Eev 5y agoDo you mean there’s an increase in sales for the plugins after the pandemic?
- Glench 5y agoI made https://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com, a service to let browser extension developers easily take payments for their extensions. But I feel like making a SaaS isn't really passive income — it's flywheel income. Takes a lot of up-front work to get it spinning and then requires a little effort here and there to keep it going.
- ALLTaken 5y agoI have talent in dev/code, but didn't use any of it. 2x Corona, short-time work, depression.. :( I'm fully open for any suggestions. It's not passive: I started investing into stocks and sold almost all for about 5% profit in total. I think many won't like it, but I used that money and invested into different cryptocurrencies. I ended up with about twice my total investment and on some days I earned more per day, than monthly with my dayjob. The goldrush wasn't forever though, because after may I'm back to my initial investment.
- archontes 5y agoMay I ask why you perceive a cryptocurrency as an 'investment'?
- ALLTaken 5y agoSure, that's a legitimate question and I appreciate it. Important background: I'm a very early adopter of technologies and I'm genuinely curious. First the terminology I used is wrong, it's not an investment, it's a mere speculation. Because the outcome is totally in the air. Right now there is not enough developer saturation in cryptocurrencies, which in my opinion is a crucial driver of industrial adoption. This may change, when the "safe/verified" development of smart-contracts and blockchain interoperability becomes easy for most developers. Transaction costs are a sign of technical debt. So there is no doubt that there will be many hardforks coming. Context: My Professor assigned me the study of "Consensus Algorithms" and the implementation of these in 2009. That made me go into a very deep rabbit hole. And I stumbled over many technologies enabling cryptocurrencies, but came out at the book he was currently reading about "Cellular Automata". That made me awe nature and it's ingenuity. I have wrongly been anti-commercial most of my life, that's why I intentionally missed bitcoin in 2010. Regardless of all the hype it's of no industrial use at the moment as long as there aren't good developers enabling it's application in the industry and at scale. I unfortunately didn't have had a circle of people who invest, rather more those who sit at the bottom of the barrel. Waking up and taking my own finances serious took way too long. Crypto is a speculation even though I invested almost all of my assets into it (€28k). I'm okay losing it, as long as I'm able to find a good job paying at least 2.7k net/month, which allows me to diversify my invests into less speculative assets.
- runawaybottle 5y agoMeme stocks. Was up 100% for the year but settled down to 45%. Will continue memeing until the end of the year. Meme profits got rolled into more legit stocks (usually just to hold profits with a possibility of some upside until I can buy a good dip), but yeah, mostly stuck to trends and bets, no real investing. Also lost money, but I memed my way out of it somehow.
- laserbones 5y agoI wrote a weird psychedelic road novel (my girlfriend describes it as The X-Files meets Big Lebowski) It makes me a couple bucks a day. The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams https://www.amazon.com/dp/B095L3L4Z1/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_49JXT9QATHFR6BCEXBF1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B095L3L4Z1/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_...
- dave333 5y agoSamurai sudoku https://samurai-sudoku.com https://samurai-sudoku.com 9x9 hard sudoku puzzles https://extremesudoku.info/hard https://extremesudoku.info/hard