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Passive Income 101: How To Travel The World Without Working

17 points by maneesh 15y ago

maneesh 15y ago
this is a resubmit because my last post disappeared from the front page with no warning, if I am not following the HN rules please let me know!
- patio11 15y ago
  It likely got flagged by enough people to kill it. I'm suspecting a combination of "Folks thought you were selling something" plus the seediness of the Make Money Online niche. The audience here also would not love the takeover lightbox. Resubmissions are frowned on, btw. FWIW, I sort of liked it, and I wish the mean startup understood SEO as well as you or the costume affiliate site.
  - maneesh 15y ago
    Thanks man :) That means a lot from you.
  - mooism2 15y ago
    In addition to that, I sometimes flag submissions that don't load.
- geoffschmidt 15y ago
  I'm getting: Request Timeout This request takes too long to process, it is timed out by the server. If it should not be timed out, please contact administrator of this web site to increase 'Connection Timeout'.
  - maneesh 15y ago
    my server host literally JUST crashed. That's insane, what bad timing, let me get you guys a cached copy asap
maneesh 15y ago
Here is a cached copy while my domain host is crashing, COME ON Page.ly : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/153216/hackernews/Passive-Income-101-How-to-Travel-the-World-Without-Working.html http://dl.dropbox.com/u/153216/hackernews/Passive-Income-101...
- maneesh 15y ago
  Sorry for the ugly doubled stuff and popups, those don't exist on the main site, it's only cause of the cache
nirvana 15y ago
This is almost becoming a cliche, but that's a good thing, because I look forward to it becoming a massive trend! I'm dong a similar thing. In 2008, my cofounder and I sold off all of our stuff, and became full-time nomads. Our reasoning was simple: Our startup was designed to be build able with just the two of us, and almost anywhere in the world is cheaper than the West Coast of the USA for costs. So, we could extend our burn rate and see the world. Win-Win! Reality is, our burn rate has been extended, but there's another cost to traveling while doing a startup, and that is time / distractions. We tend to spend 90 days in each country (the usual visa limit) before moving on. But the relocations are enough of a hassle that we lose 2-4 weeks in productivity each time it happens, or about %25 of a year gets "lost". Of course, much of this "loss" is great experiences-- like the week long layover we had in Venice Italy. (We saved money on a transatlantic flight by taking that "sacrifice", even including the marginal increase in our cost of living from staying near Venice.) AirBNB is a great thing for this. We almost live full time in AirBNB places, the exceptions being locations where AirBnB doesn't have great coverage, or places where the visa lets us stay long enough to get a short term apartment. We also use a passive income stream approach. Our past products have been on the AppStore, and the nice thing about that is, even a year or two later, they still earn. They take periodic maintenance and updates (Which increasingly becomes a distraction when you want to move from the "lifestyle" business of iPhone Apps into a more "startup" business, which we're doing now.) From the beginning we focused on passive income. In fact, we didn't start an online business or web oriented business because we didn't know if we'd be able to have internet access when out on the road. I didn't want to have servers go down and not be able to deal with it. That's the nice thing about the App Store. It never goes down, and you don't have to maintain it. In the interim we discovered that most AirBnB places have internet. The times we've had to get our own internet have been the most painful.... mobile broadband is not as convenient or cost effective as I thought it might be... and that was, it turns out, in a country where its really cheap and readily available compared to the US! I can't comment on the specific strategies recommended in this article, but I can say that it can be done, especially if you're young and willing to live cheap, cheap, cheap. (we're not either so its a bit harder for us.) Anyway, I think that over the next decade, the US will continue to deteriorate some, the infrastructure globally will improve, and more and more people will discover that they don't need a lot of funding to do a real startup, and thus real startups can be done on the road. Outsourcing, or even just having the incredible leverage things like the App Store give you makes this more and more possible. The more mobile the workforce becomes, the more integrated the global economy, and the better for peace and the better for prosperity!
j45 15y ago
Nice story, thanks for sharing.
nirvana 15y ago
When your server crashes like this... you can easily fix it by going to S3. just create a bucket with your domain name (Eg: maneeshsethi.com) then load a static page into that bucket, turn on "web access" in the S3 control panel, and redirect your DNS to the S3 CName. Let amazon handle the load for you, and then redirect back later. (for this reason it might be good to have your DNS set up with a 60 minute timeout.) PS- I have to laugh that I'm getting down voted for trying to help here.
- ido 15y ago
  How about an even better solution using cloudfront? Both cheaper and faster than s3 :)

17 points by maneesh 15y ago

this is a resubmit because my last post disappeared from the front page with no warning, if I am not following the HN rules please let me know!

patio11 15y ago
It likely got flagged by enough people to kill it. I'm suspecting a combination of "Folks thought you were selling something" plus the seediness of the Make Money Online niche. The audience here also would not love the takeover lightbox. Resubmissions are frowned on, btw. FWIW, I sort of liked it, and I wish the mean startup understood SEO as well as you or the costume affiliate site.
- maneesh 15y ago
  Thanks man :) That means a lot from you.
- mooism2 15y ago
  In addition to that, I sometimes flag submissions that don't load.
geoffschmidt 15y ago
I'm getting: Request Timeout This request takes too long to process, it is timed out by the server. If it should not be timed out, please contact administrator of this web site to increase 'Connection Timeout'.
- maneesh 15y ago
  my server host literally JUST crashed. That's insane, what bad timing, let me get you guys a cached copy asap

maneesh 15y ago

Here is a cached copy while my domain host is crashing, COME ON Page.ly : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/153216/hackernews/Passive-Income-101-How-to-Travel-the-World-Without-Working.html http://dl.dropbox.com/u/153216/hackernews/Passive-Income-101...

maneesh 15y ago
Sorry for the ugly doubled stuff and popups, those don't exist on the main site, it's only cause of the cache

nirvana 15y ago

This is almost becoming a cliche, but that's a good thing, because I look forward to it becoming a massive trend! I'm dong a similar thing. In 2008, my cofounder and I sold off all of our stuff, and became full-time nomads. Our reasoning was simple: Our startup was designed to be build able with just the two of us, and almost anywhere in the world is cheaper than the West Coast of the USA for costs. So, we could extend our burn rate and see the world. Win-Win! Reality is, our burn rate has been extended, but there's another cost to traveling while doing a startup, and that is time / distractions. We tend to spend 90 days in each country (the usual visa limit) before moving on. But the relocations are enough of a hassle that we lose 2-4 weeks in productivity each time it happens, or about %25 of a year gets "lost". Of course, much of this "loss" is great experiences-- like the week long layover we had in Venice Italy. (We saved money on a transatlantic flight by taking that "sacrifice", even including the marginal increase in our cost of living from staying near Venice.) AirBNB is a great thing for this. We almost live full time in AirBNB places, the exceptions being locations where AirBnB doesn't have great coverage, or places where the visa lets us stay long enough to get a short term apartment. We also use a passive income stream approach. Our past products have been on the AppStore, and the nice thing about that is, even a year or two later, they still earn. They take periodic maintenance and updates (Which increasingly becomes a distraction when you want to move from the "lifestyle" business of iPhone Apps into a more "startup" business, which we're doing now.) From the beginning we focused on passive income. In fact, we didn't start an online business or web oriented business because we didn't know if we'd be able to have internet access when out on the road. I didn't want to have servers go down and not be able to deal with it. That's the nice thing about the App Store. It never goes down, and you don't have to maintain it. In the interim we discovered that most AirBnB places have internet. The times we've had to get our own internet have been the most painful.... mobile broadband is not as convenient or cost effective as I thought it might be... and that was, it turns out, in a country where its really cheap and readily available compared to the US! I can't comment on the specific strategies recommended in this article, but I can say that it can be done, especially if you're young and willing to live cheap, cheap, cheap. (we're not either so its a bit harder for us.) Anyway, I think that over the next decade, the US will continue to deteriorate some, the infrastructure globally will improve, and more and more people will discover that they don't need a lot of funding to do a real startup, and thus real startups can be done on the road. Outsourcing, or even just having the incredible leverage things like the App Store give you makes this more and more possible. The more mobile the workforce becomes, the more integrated the global economy, and the better for peace and the better for prosperity!

j45 15y ago

Nice story, thanks for sharing.

nirvana 15y ago

When your server crashes like this... you can easily fix it by going to S3. just create a bucket with your domain name (Eg: maneeshsethi.com) then load a static page into that bucket, turn on "web access" in the S3 control panel, and redirect your DNS to the S3 CName. Let amazon handle the load for you, and then redirect back later. (for this reason it might be good to have your DNS set up with a 60 minute timeout.) PS- I have to laugh that I'm getting down voted for trying to help here.

ido 15y ago
How about an even better solution using cloudfront? Both cheaper and faster than s3 :)