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Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

• waster 13y ago
  I am no expert, but if I understand correctly, a blog can generate passive income from archives, although this requires that you steadily update the current content (to retain and/or increase site traffic). Not sure this would meet your needs, though, because maintaining a blog can require a lot of work.
• Hydraulix989 13y ago
  I've done this through licensing SaaS to social gaming companies (apps). It took a fair bit of work though -- I'd say 6 hours daily.
• mammalfriend 13y ago
  You could generate targeted affiliate links on social media sites. (from social media sites to amazon, etc)
• contingencies 13y ago
  Work someplace. Live frugally. Don't spend the money. Leave it in term deposits or other low risk, relatively high yield (ie. at least above inflation) locations. Rinse and repeat. (Recently, I heard that Vietnam offers solid rates on term deposits in foreign currencies.)
  • greghinch 13y ago
    Having spent some time in Vietnam, and spoken with residents (expats and natives), I would not invest my money there. Or most SEA countries. Too many tales of foreigners getting screwed with little to no recourse.
    • wilfra 13y ago
      That's quite a sweeping (and inaccurate) generalization. I have no experience banking in Vietnam but what he said certainly applies to both China and Thailand, if you stick to the largest banks (ICBC and Construction Bank in China are both probably safer than any US bank - Bangkok Bank, Bank of Ayudhya (owned by GE) and Siam Commercial are all rock solid in Thailand - along with HSBC in both countries). Singapore and Hong Kong are both also extremely safe places to bank and very foreigner friendly. Source: Lived over there for 6+ years. Still bank with all of those banks, more or less doing exactly what he suggested. In China I earn 3.5% on my RMB term deposits + appreciation vs the dollar, which is almost as predictable as the interest. Personally, I prefer that to 0.1% at Wells Fargo.
      • cageface 13y ago
        I've been living in Vietnam for more than two years now and there is no way I would put any significant amount of money in a Vietnamese bank. Interest rates have already fallen to under 10%. What's worse - just about everybody I've talked to that understands the Vietnamese economy thinks that the banks here are headed for a serious insolvency crisis. A number of expats here that had planned on living comfortably off the interest of their Vietnamese bank deposits are now scrambling to come up with a plan B.
        • deleted 13y ago
          [deleted]
      • jacknews 13y ago
        It may be sweeping but it's certainly not inaccurate. Try Cambodia for example. People lost their deposits not that long ago. Not much in the way of government safeguards, certainly not for foreigners. Indeed, the government are the biggest crooks, and I don't mean that in the weak "Banksters" sense that applies to western govt, I mean a good percentage are ex warlords and gansters, lead by same.
    • contingencies 13y ago
      Eggs and baskets!
  • vacri 13y ago
    I went to Vietnam nearly two years ago, and the inflation rate at the time was 22%. I'm not a financial guy, but inherently that doesn't sound low-risk.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • contingencies 13y ago
      You missed the bit ...in foreign currencies. I'm not saying it's true, just that someone I met who was living there long term and sounded like he knew what he was talking about swore it was the best feature of the country, and was certainly no idiot.
• trg2 13y ago
  Ramit Sethi has a great post from last year on why passive income is largely a myth for most people: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/how-i-traveled-for-3-weeks-and-made-passive-income/ http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/how-i-traveled-for...
• perryh2 13y ago
  I trade stocks as a hobby and have been able to make some money.
  • mathgladiator 13y ago
    I second this; it's the best hobby ever.
    • shocks 13y ago
      Any advice from you guys on places to start researching?
  • gfodor 13y ago
    This of course is an easy thing to do when you are in the middle of a raging bull market, as we are now. However, there are a number of reasons to believe assets are extremely over priced and yields are not compensating investors for the risk they are taking.
  • jerguismi 13y ago
    It is not passive...
    • WalterBright 13y ago
      Buy & hold is about as passive as it gets.
  • vicapow 13y ago
    I trade stocks as a hobby and have been able to loss money. just kidding. but really, a single sample is not a good statistic. Also: http://www.mnn.com/family/pets/stories/cat-outperforms-professionals-in-stock-market http://www.mnn.com/family/pets/stories/cat-outperforms-profe...
• joshdotsmith 13y ago
  Please read this post by Amy Hoy: http://unicornfree.com/2013/how-do-you-create-a-product-people-want-to-buy http://unicornfree.com/2013/how-do-you-create-a-product-peop...
• hayksaakian 13y ago
  If you have any kind of social media following, you could exploit it with affiliate links. Someone posted a good article about finding niches in the app store recently. Something simple that satisfies an unmet need could earn decent ad money.
  • tpsc 13y ago
    http://www.trevormckendrick.com/how-to-choose-a-profitable-niche/ http://www.trevormckendrick.com/how-to-choose-a-profitable-n...
    • hayksaakian 13y ago
      Yeah that's the one. There's a follow up worth reading as well.
• pknerd 13y ago
  create an iPhone/Android app
• mynameishere 13y ago
  If there was some method of turning a skill into passive income with any reliability, people would replicate the idea again and again and so get 1,000,000/month eventually. You're asking for the impossible.
  • jasonkester 13y ago
    False. Imagine you had a magic formula to create businesses that make $5,000/month and only take up 10 hours/week of your time. Wave that wand once and you have a $60k salary and a thoroughly leisure class lifestyle. Wave it twice and you're living quite nicely without really breaking a sweat. Most of us stopped there. Notice that every time you use your magic formula, you take away another chunk of your free time. By the time you've done it four times, you've got a full time job. That's the reason most of us are smart enough not to build $1,000,000/month worth of micro businesses. If that's the sort of money you'd prefer to make, you'll need to find another way to get it. But don't knock the magic formula. It works really well. You'd be doing yourself a disservice to believe otherwise.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • aaron695 13y ago
      I think you've miss read the question > I have 1-2 hours daily that I can spend on any project/activity that will, after some work, generate $1000/per month net in passive income. $1000/28days at lets say 1.5hours = $23 per hour. So I'm guessing they are not wanting to do the 1-2 hours per day once it's up and running, because $23/hour is not passive income.
  • sneak 13y ago
    Uhh, it's called a tech startup. Just because most of them fail doesn't mean it's asking the impossible. This very site exists because even a tiny positive hitrate is sufficient for significant positive return. Everything from AdWords to Uber is just "people replicating the idea" into $1M+/month.
• tudorconstantin 13y ago
  I am in continuous search for this type of passive income for about 8 years. I've tried with (automatically generated) content farms, social media spamming and all kind of more or less moral stuff. I got to the conclusion that the answer should be in the immaculate white hat area and i am focusing on building software in that area. Also, i dont think that100% passive is even possible, but you could reach a level where your product gets you enough income so that you become an entrepreneur
• readme 13y ago
  1. Identify a problem that affects a significant market, and a problem that you can solve within reason yourself. 2. Create a solution that people are willing to pay for. 3. Sell it. Tune out everything else. Ignore the gurus. Focus on the important things only and just do it. Tune out HN, tune out everything. I would look into doing paid mobile apps. But you still need to have 1-3 nailed. Definitely read PG's startup ideas article. You don't just sit down one day and think of startup ideas. It will come to you naturally because you will experience the problem. Any other way (other than partnering up with a problem experiencer) will yield fluff.
  • joelrunyon 13y ago
    Find a problem. Solve It. Charge For It. Start off with a service you provide manually. If you get a good response, turn it into a tool or software that automates it in exchange for a monthly fee. Stop looking for "easy get rich quick" ideas and find the annoying, difficult stuff that people want to offload from their task list. That's where the money is.
• gfodor 13y ago
  Save $200k and buy a 33% leveraged muni bond closed end fund, which are currently yielding approx 6% tax free at a 10% discount due to the recent bond selloff. Disclaimer: if interest rates rise you will be unable to reclaim your principal but, generally speaking, this income stream should be pretty safe for the foreseeable future. And of course, $1000 a month today is not going to be as much in the future if inflation returns to 3%.
  • dustyleary 13y ago
    Can you give an example of funds like this? Maybe instructions on how you would search for them?
    • smartician 13y ago
      NAD would be an example, or, if you're in California, NAC (state tax free, but geographically concentrated in CA). There are other bargains out there now too, because of fears of the Fed tapering down QE, anything that yields >5% got hit hard in the recent weeks. Even foreign, emerging market bonds. ESD for example trades at a 7% discount and yields 7.5% at the moment. For research, Morningstar is a good starting point: http://cef.morningstar.com/quote?t=esd http://cef.morningstar.com/quote?t=esd
  • adventured 13y ago
    Doing this at the point in time in which money is about as cheap as it has ever been in history due to hyper QE to hold down rates, is a very, very bad idea. It's not a question of if rates will rise. They're going to rise a lot, because every day that goes by the cost of artificially suppressing rates gets more expensive (which is why the Fed has had to keep expanding their QE program). Equal but opposite reaction, is what will occur, conceptually. To the extent they've created hyper cheap money, is the extent to which money will be expensive, sooner than later I'd argue. The bond bubble is nearing an end. If the Fed wishes to continue it, it's going to cost trillions worth of new inflation, setting up a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. The era of cheap money is over. If you want to earn a return on your $200k, wait for the inevitable disaster that follows these insane central bank policies. Swoop in with your pile of cash and pick up dirt cheap assets after the next crash. Or go after yield as rates skyrocket in the next five years.
• Jach 13y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5207179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5207179 Discussion on making your own "Incredible Secret Money Machine".
• ctek 13y ago
  I created a simple SaaS app, https://www.pageblox.com/ https://www.pageblox.com/ that makes $300 dollars a month. I think that in a year or slightly more it could break a thousand a month if I market aggressively. I think I was able to pull it off by targeting a very specific problem and its accompanying keyword phrase: "css layout generator". Over-simplifying, the steps are: 1. find a problem that people and have and its niche, low competition keyword that get about 5000-8000 searches a month 2. build a web based app that solves that problem 3. grow your traffic 4. a/b test and iterate Marketing is by far the hardest part!
  • adventured 13y ago
    Have you thought about charging $3 / month, or maybe $12 per year for this instead of a one-time purchase? If you're saving / hosting the layouts, in which users can come back and create new ones or alter old ones, it jives nicely with charging on a recurring basis. Throw in another service or two on top of what you already do, and the value proposition just keeps going up.
  • tmzt 13y ago
    If you've got it working well, there are (smallish) hosting companies that might be interested in white labeling it, assuming it can support templating as well.
• cglee 13y ago
  1. Identify a very niche pain for businesses. 2. Make phone calls every day to the people making buying decisions for that pain. Try to close the deal, even without a product. 3. Start building after your first deal closes. 4. As you build, keep calling and closing. 5. Script out common support issues as you encounter them, and offload to VA. My previous startup generates many times more passive income than $1k/mo, and I did it the "hard" way by building the product first, then try to sell to customers. Also, don’t underestimate support costs. Finally, keep in mind that you'll probably have to start an actual business in order to open a business bank account to collect money, and you'll have all the fees and legal obligations that goes along with owning a business, so your $1k/mo can easily turn into $500/mo after all that jazz. Edit: I'll also add to stay away from targeting consumers directly, and instead go after businesses. Much easier to charge $199/mo to a real estate broker than $9/mo to Joe Consumer. The former won't blink an eye for a truly useful service, whereas you'll get overwhelmed with support issues on the latter.
  • CPAhem 13y ago
    Businesses are way better than Joe Consumer, they need less support and pay more. On that subject, stay away from "free" plans, unless you really need freemium marketing - the support for free users is usually the most.
• hislaziness 13y ago
  Monetizing your hobbies/interests would be a good way of enjoying your free time and make some money. It won't be very passive though.
• Sealy 13y ago
  I made a lot of passive income by coding trading bots for bitcoin. Its a steep learning curve but if you are willing to learn, it can be very profitable. Like you, I can code confidently so during my morning commute I would read books about trading and economics. In the evening I would play with bits of code interfacing with broker API's. Within 3 months I had a working bot that automatically traded away as I slept and went about my day job (passive enough for you?). Fast forward 6 months with a couple of hours coding a week refining my algorithms, my bots earned me more than double what I made in my day job that whole year.
  • CPAhem 13y ago
    What did your bitcoin bots trade?
    • abcd_f 13y ago
      Uhm... Bitcoins?
    • kseistrup 13y ago
      Bitcoin and another currency (presumably dollars, as BTCUSD has the highest liquidity). Buy when bitcoin exchange rate is low'ish, sell when it's high'ish, reap the margin.
      • Sealy 13y ago
        Yes thats correct. And yes, in a sentence you've described a simple but profitable strategy, one of many :).
  • ploureiro 13y ago
    Can you recommend any specific books? (on trading) Cheers
    • mikecsh 13y ago
      Inside the Black Box
• hkmurakami 13y ago
  do any kind of freelance/consulting work then invest the process into high dividend stocks and eventually shift to bonds as interest rates rise in the next few years. you can find quite a few large cap, stable companies on the cheap that yield on the order of 5%. take into account the lower tax rates on dividends and your real income rate becomes higher.
• aaron695 13y ago
  I never get why these vague I want money posts get to the front page, how is this hacking? Wanting more money, for little work? That's status quo. Anyway stop wasting your life on stuff would be my tip. Or Learn to cook well(healthy and tasty) over a few months, it'll save you money and health costs. Great tax free not wasting money passive habit to pick up.
  • adventured 13y ago
    Hacker News != just news on hacking
  • patio11 13y ago
    Consider it the creative application of computer code to systemic weaknesses in the global economy, with a clearly defined success function which is fairly difficult to fudge. That might help explain some of the attraction. (There's also the "If you only know W-2 employees, then making money by a legitimate means other than a day job feels like cheating", and for some reason a lot of hackers like winning by rules exploitation more than they like winning.)
    • aaron695 13y ago
      Good hack, yep that's a interesting question. Edit: Weakness - language. Solution get a bi-lingual friend who can suggest a non English success story. This in reverse http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/the-germany-website-copy-machine http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/the-germany-...
    • skarmklart 13y ago
      For me, it doesn't feel like cheating. The way I see it, the normal way to earn money (ie employment) is the inefficient/underpaid way. It's not cheating if you're merely getting your fair share :)
• chipsy 13y ago
  Find a very boring problem that you can automate into a product that needs minimal support. By "very boring" I mean: necessary for a certain line of business and not well addressed by current competitors and not inherently interesting to work on and full of ugly gotchas and corner cases. In general, solutions to these problems will be very profitable because they represent untapped markets. The only difficulties are: finding a problem sufficiently boring, and how much of it you can tolerate before it crushes your soul.
• WestCoastJustin 13y ago
  When you have some ideas, before you start, spend the first couple hours reading "The Lean Startup" [1] by Eric Ries. This book will give you a measuring stick to see if these ideas work. [1] http://www.amazon.ca/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous/dp/0307887898 http://www.amazon.ca/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuo...
  • jacknews 13y ago
    The problem is most people don't know what they want even when it slaps them in the face. Lean startup is just a search algorithm, finding what people say they want, it doesn't create or educate markets. That's where the real progress is.
• jacquesm 13y ago
  Passive income isn't. Lots of little projects may look like passive income but almost all of them (not saying it can't be done but I just have not seen any) have some kind of overhead. It may be better to search for something that can be started small but that you can eventually scale.
  • h2s 13y ago
    When people say they want "passive income", I take it to mean "I want to start a tiny business and then neglect it and hope it dies slowly".
    • jacquesm 13y ago
      I take it to mean "I want to start a small business with a fixed up-front investment and eternal steady income". I don't think they hope it dies slowly, it is just that it will die slowly.
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    • jasonkester 13y ago
      In my experience, tiny SaaS businesses tend to grow when neglected, rather than die. Once a product is good enough for people to start signing up for and using, it often doesn't require much more development work. As long as people can find it, more people will sign up than cancel in any given month. "Passive" is a really good way to describe the experience of owning one of these little businesses, once you've dialed things in so that the support workload is measured in hours/month and you're firing up the IDE maybe twice in a heavy month.
      • ValentineC 13y ago
        > In my experience, tiny SaaS businesses tend to grow when neglected, rather than die. Just curious: what if a new competitor moves in? Or is does that not happen often?
• mixmixmix 13y ago
  No such thing as "passive income" except maybe buying securitized debt (bonds, etc. but then you got inflation to worry about). A business is a business; the amount of labor you'll have to put into it will be proportional to the supply and demand that exists in that specific market. Sorry, but there's no free lunch.
  • dlss 13y ago
    He's not looking for a free lunch -- he's looking for specific market ideas. Also, while I sort of agree about the "no such thing as passive income" point, I think he just means 1-2 hours a week level passive.
• thejosh 13y ago
  If you think there is such thing as passive income, you have anything thing coming. If you want to be sold a "passive income mega business", go and have a look at Blackhat World, the scummiest place on the internet.
• dools 13y ago
  If you have 1 - 2 hours per day and you're willing to learn anything, learn to write and build an audience. An audience is a more valuable asset than a product. Once you have an audience you can launch anything you want.
  • bobbyongce 13y ago
    totally agree with this. learning how to market is underrated big time. i'm taking this route now by writing first, building an audience and then see how i can launch things later on
• martinkallstrom 13y ago
  Here is a problem that I would pay a subscription for a great solution to: Cron as a service. Sometimes when you set up a simple codestack on Heroku or Parse or similar, it would be great to be able to specify a web hook that should be called repeatedly just to run maintenance code, summarize scores, clean up logs etc. If you have root access you can set up cron but this is not always the case, and I think it would be possible to build a SaaS that people feel is easier to use and more flexible than cron. I would easily pay a few dollars a month for a simple reliable cron service. Reliability is key, your service needs to never ever fail.
  • davidmat 13y ago
    http://webcron.org/ http://webcron.org/ does this
  • adventured 13y ago
    I use one of these for various side tasks, because I got sick of having to run cron jobs for servers that I might switch between or kill off, and I run a lot of cron jobs. I also like the idea of offloading the cron hits to an independent service, so my servers focus strictly on more important tasks. http://cronless.com http://cronless.com It's the first one I found that I liked and was reliable. It's very modestly priced as well. I wouldn't suggest this for passive income however, as cron is a very low cost, value added type product. It's difficult to charge much for it stand-alone. You'd want to bundle a suite of services, like ping / uptime, cron, etc etc. into one.
  • davidjgraph 13y ago
    > Reliability is key, your service needs to never ever fail. Then that sounds like it need a serious full time commitment. The OP seems to be looking for a specific category of ideas that require minimal maintenance, rather than any ideas.
    • rmc 13y ago
      100% uptime is impossible. Remember you can get 99% uptime (2 nines) if you're down for 4 days in a year.
• andrewljohnson 13y ago
  I think it will be hard to build much of note in 1-2 hour chunks. Better to spend 16 hours every other weekend, in 2 eight-hour blocks.
• jbrooksuk 13y ago
  I've also been thinking of the exact same thing myself, something which will generate enough profit to pay off bills, buy something nice and invest a little in growing the idea. Recently I've been working on https://www.emlipo.com https://www.emlipo.com which was scrutinized by HN for essentially being "little code nobody would pay for". So I've not really wanted to work on that now. Still, there will be something out there I'm sure. By the way, the demo is currently offline. I'm currently at work, but shall try to get it back on.
  • bromley 13y ago
    I missed your show HN thread, sorry. But for what it's worth I think your service looks cool. Your pricing looks too low to me - perhaps a sign of your lack of confidence in the idea - I think you could do with some higher-volume packages too.
    • jbrooksuk 13y ago
      No worries, a lot comes in on HN. Thank you, you have no idea how much that means to me! Too low? That's a great sign too! In regards to higher-volume packages, I most certainly agree, however we want to ensure we're able to handle the potential volume of requests so far. What do you think about the limits and throttles for each package?
  • bulatb 13y ago
    That semicolon (;) in your footer should be a colon (:). [0] [0] http://i.imgur.com/VHYGbSd.png http://i.imgur.com/VHYGbSd.png
    • jbrooksuk 13y ago
      Good spot! I hate bad Grammar too!
    • trusche 13y ago
      Same in the tagline, or better yet, just remove it there. Interesting idea and nice site.
• reinhardt 13y ago
  There are several replies that start with "find a problem". How do you find problems small enough for a single developer to tackle but not trivial enough for having people willing to pay for a solution?
  • PedroCandeias 13y ago
    I would suggest leaving your comfort zone. Developers like myself have a tendency to reinvent the wheel, as in, solve problems like online team chat over and over again. Because that's what we know first hand and are comfortable with. The webapp for online marketeers I'm currently building, with feedback from a friend in the industry, caters to a bit of a niche but I'll probably have far greater success with it because that niche is quite underserved. I would never had thought of that particular idea had I not wondered off outside my comfort zone and talked to people in other areas. I don't expect my project to become a passive income stream. It'll take work. But maybe the same method can be applied to find a problem which has a trivial, low-maintenance solution.
• rk0567 13y ago
  Write an ebook on something you're passionate about (it would be better if it solves a problem, in a niche) and self publish it online, use gumroad or something to handling payments and delivery!
• WalterBright 13y ago
  Cut your spending so you have a few hundred extra per month. Invest it in SPY (an index stock for the S&P 500). Over time, you'll build up passive income. One reasonable way to cut spending is to sell your car if you have financed it, and buy a car you can afford to pay cash for. Financing is a huge drain on your cash.
  • bayesianhorse 13y ago
    That really depends on the overall situation. Financing a car that you could afford in cash might well be less risky than having too little cash on hand for emergencies.
    • WalterBright 13y ago
      The people I know who finance their car have no cash for emergencies, either, because their money goes to the finance company.
  • adventured 13y ago
    This isn't a good strategy. First of all the timing factor alone can hammer your principle (particularly with stocks sitting at all time highs). If you have a skill that is valuable, you're far better off leveraging into that, for the returns are massive by comparison to the puny returns in stock indices. If you can earn just 10% every year in stocks, you're a wizard that should be working on Wall Street earning millions. It's radically easier to invest $100 into hosting ($10 or $20 / month at digital ocean), build a service, and make $1,000 a month (a huge return on the invested capital) - than to earn a mere 10% per year in stocks. $1,000 / month = $12,000 per year. To put together $12k per year from stocks, at a 10% return (which is a great return per year historically), you'd need $120,000 in capital to begin with. Scenario 1) you need $120k in cash to put to work in stocks to yield just $1,000 per month average in new capital, assuming a great historical return (and assuming you don't get demolished by a market down turn). And if you're riding dividends, you're going to be hard pressed to consistently yield 10% every year even from the best dividend investments (such as public trusts, real estate vehicles etc). Scenario 2) invest $20 per month into a hosting account at digital ocean and build a service that yields $1k per month in income. #1 is silly compared to #2
• WalterBright 13y ago
  One way is to write ebooks and sell them on Amazon. If you write things that don't get dated, there is no further work on your part, Amazon just deposits money in your account. It's highly unlikely you'd make $1000/mo on a single ebook, but if you write several, the trickle from each adds up.
  • zura 13y ago
    I'd definitely buy your book about compiler construction.
• davidjgraph 13y ago
  I hate to be the cynic (lies), but there's no such thing as a "passive income". The moment you put your service online you'll have active maintenance and support, even if you don't charge for it. The other problem is that if you solve a problem well, it's actually extremely hard to avoid the business scaling. Once the revenue goes past 1k/month, it'll carry on going, and few people can bring themselves to remove purchase links. I know that's essentially what you're asking, but my answer would be no, it's unlikely that you can find a model that fits exactly the criteria you have. I notice many people posting ideas, rather than low-maintenance ideas.
  • bayesianhorse 13y ago
    You'll have maintenance and support especially if you don't charge for that.
  • hayksaakian 13y ago
    If you're willing to take the long tail hit, you can avoid maintenance and support. See: apps that are 2-3+ years old, still collecting $$$ without updates.
  • josscrowcroft 13y ago
    Totally agree - in my experience, passive income is anything but passive. It's more involved than most 'real jobs' I've worked. Have you tried negotiating tax forms, outsourcing (ha) customer support, maintaining a partially hacked-together codebase, or even having legal documents written that cost an entire month's salary? There are a great many unsexy things that need doing when you run your own business, which regular jobs shield you from (my next 8 weeks' task list is currently averaging 300 items) - that's the trade-off. And then there's the 12-hour days you'll put in for months, while setting it up... PS: it's so worth it.
  • thenomad 13y ago
    Sell an information product. They don't really have to have either maintainance or support. I have an ebook out there that I haven't touched for about 2 years. I check the email address associated with it about once every three months. It's still selling. However, you are absolutely right - maintainance and support can turn a passive product into something Not Passive At All. It's something to watch out for very carefully if you genuinely want passive income.
• drewcrawford 13y ago
  Two ideas. 1. I desperately want to be able to send a link to somebody and have them be able to book a N-minute meeting on my calendar (CalDav) without any further interaction. I have spent probably several hours trying out products, all of which suck. I currently spend $30/month on a tool that really doesn't even work. 2. The enterprise IM (CampFire, HipChat, etc.) is pretty well done at this point, but the "group chat for the somewhat public" space isn't. If I am supporting an open-source project the only game in town is IRC, which is hard to use for people who need support. If I want to have a permanent chatroom with 15 software developers that I know socially and allow people to drop in, there's no system for that.
  • iffyuva 13y ago
    I believe HipChat has this concept of 'Guest Access'. Won't that be helpful, just curious.
  • PedroCandeias 13y ago
    1. Just out of curiosity, could you please share what that tool is? 2. Like iffyuva said, I believe HipChat has that option. As does Campfire. The thing is maybe those groups aren't willing to pay for such a solution?
    • drewcrawford 13y ago
      > The thing is maybe those groups aren't willing to pay for such a solution? Actually I think they want to pay more. At least I do. HipChat charges $2/user; I would pay $5 or $10. The real problem is that tools designed for companies consolidate the billing. If I start a chat for my local user group then I am on the hook socially to upgrade my plan to let new people join. If I am successful in cultivating a useful chat then essentially I am punished for it, and the punishment grows without bound. One of the groups I participate in has over a thousand members. Meanwhile I would be happy to pay for a friend or three, with the understanding that the other 997 people who may want to join need to pay their own way. And with mostly individual accounts you can probably ask for significantly more per user than HipChat can. And the effort to get people to sign up might be effectively free if you funnel part of the license fee back to the organization who no longer needs to pass the hat around for pizza money or whatever. This may create regulatory problems, but if we're just talking about the customer acquisition equation, there are a lot of awkward situations where somebody forgot to bring cash that I would very happily roll into a monthly debit to forget about.
• ihatehandles 13y ago
  Ever noticed that all the suggestions you are getting are to some other person a passion and full startup that they are pursuing? That should tell you something. Good luck :)
• nichols 13y ago
  Have you tried getting reincarnated as a rich guy? Alternately, you could create your own crypto-currency and get chumps to bid it up. Buy some oregano and try to sell it as marijuana. If all else fails, you could try doing some actual work.
• patio11 13y ago
  Some options: 1) Do you have freelancing or other experience which has exposed you to multiple people with similar problems? For example, have you implemented the same "$()#% authentication system for a web application 20 times? Package up that one little piece of the puzzle into a scalable way to teach people to do it without needing to have you or someone similarly skilled on their team. Common form factors include ebooks. Sell the ebook. If you want to sell lots of the ebook, start by offering some free incentive to get people to trade you their email address, then send them email about $TOPIC for a while to make them trust you as an authority on it, then ask them to buy your thing. (Note: You don't have to be the world's leading expert on building authentication systems. You've just taken somebody's shilling to do it twenty times, which means that it is likely much, much cheaper for somebody to buy your thing and hand it to his junior developer than it is to pay a similarly-experienced engineer to do that part of the system.) 2) Failing that, talk to businesses. I could give you a vague fact pattern to ask about (a problem which is amenable to a solution with code) but people seem to get hung up on that so I'll give you something really specific: you are looking for a MS Excel spreadsheet which has ever been mailed by Bob to Cindy, had Cindy edit it, and mail it back to Bob. Every time this happens a SaaS app gets its wings. Now go out and find, in the actual physical world, ten firms which have that same darn spreadsheet. Offer to build them a software system which solves the business problem which that spreadsheet represents. Ask if they would pay (pick a number based on how big the firm is) $50 to $250 a month for it. If yes, ask them to commit to buying it when it is ready. If you get 5 commits, build it, sell to them (n.b. you'll lose some commits here), and then start trying to sell it in more scalable Internet-y ways. 3) Failing that, Bingo Card Creator, an app which does everything wrong in terms of business model and market selection, sold ~$1k a month something like 6 months after launch just because I got halfway decent at organic SEO. If you're willing to get good at one generalizable acquisition strategy (SEO, Facebook ads, AdWords, etc etc), with that wind behind you even turkeys can fly. (It often turns out that there are more lucrative options than pushing turkeys around.) 4) Find or create one proprietary data source which is not currently exposed to Google which answers a question that demonstrates commercial intent. Expose that proprietary data source to Google. The federal government has approximately 100,000 CSV files of interesting data which are not helpful to someone asking questions like (not a good example site, but a great example of there-is-an-answer-to-this-buried-in-a-free-CSV) "What is the median salary of mid-career dentists in Topeka, Kansas?" How you monetize a site like that depends on the specifics of the niche and how savvy you are about it. Lead generation is very lucrative, if the question you're answering tends to suggest near-term commercial intent in something with a liquid market. If you want to make a lot less money in a braindead simple fashion, just slap adsense on it. Also, I think I alluded to this above, but anybody capable of executing on any of these has ipso facto developed skills which can be employed by Real Companies with Real Budgets to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in marginal revenue. I know you said you want passive options but more active options, like selling consulting, are things that might well fit where you are in life a few years down the road.
• hendricius 13y ago
  I launched a forum in 2006 and it so far generated passive income nicely. However since 2011 the revenue continuously declined. Building a forum is great due to user generated content. Other idea I had was to build a reddit scraper. The site has like 500 users a day. I take the content and make it more readable and fun to use. I really like the concept of scraping, taking content and enhancing it.
• scw 13y ago
  A service I'd pay for: Mailing list management that doesn't suck, and isn't Google Groups. Something that can be backed up, and has a web interface. Mailman is still king in this niche, and I'm not entirely sure why.
  • captainbenises 13y ago
    This is a good idea, surely someone has already made a good mailing list tool?
    • kehers 13y ago
      There is basecamp's breeze. For some reasons, it's shutting down August though. basecamp.com/breeze
    • JoachimSchipper 13y ago
      Zed Shaw's http://lamsonproject.org/ http://lamsonproject.org/ looked interesting, last time I looked at it. (If you forgive it for pretending all the world is UTF-8, which it emphatically isn't.)
• noAlchemy 13y ago
  How's your maths? Here's something I'd pay quite a lot for: intelligent inventory optimisation in an easy to use SaaS format. Quite mathematically intensive to do well, so most SMEs don't have the skills, but directly saves money so has a clear value proposition. Some pointers for an MVP I think might be sensible: Model stock arrival and product ordering as Poisson point process with probability based on recent data Combine with sales data & length of ordering cycle to reach suggested quantity per order (you could make suggestions to account for covering variations in customer ordering based on standard deviations) I'm thinking of doing this myself for my business but really not finding the time to get it done!
  • anty 13y ago
    There seems to be a lot of competition in this field. Did you evaluate existing services? It's an interesting problem.
    • noAlchemy 13y ago
      I've had a look (but not intensively, it's a back-burner thing for me at the moment). Everything seems very heavyweight and aimed at big businesses with long supply chains. For a small ecommerce retailer, you don't want much like that; maybe I've missed it but there seems to be a gap for the Basecamp of this niche. A shopify plugin might be a good way to get standardised i/o rather than adapting to proprietary systems
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• unono 13y ago
  Think of problems, outline a solution into a video and a pitch, put it on kickstarter and market. You only need to implement it after you received the money (the lean startup method). To find problems, do searches on google, yahoo answers, and twitter. Look at the bureau of labor job outlook handbook online and see which parts of each job could be eased with software, or whether online marketplaces could be created (taxi drivers -> uber, hotel desk clerks -> airbnb). Also, each section of craigslist is potentially a online marketplace. Grab data and build recommendation systems. Movie, music, book, stock/currency prediction, photo, video, blog, vacation, sentiment, patents, similar people (from facebook/twitter/blogs). Programmatically generate data visualizations and put them on youtube, slap ads on. Build control systems for drones to automate transportation/photography/surveillance/games. Look at the academic research and commercialize it. Drones that can play catch games, deliver orders to tables, do photography for functions/weddings, do surveillance of perimeters of offices/homes.
• dangero 13y ago
  Pick an app on the iPhone that is currently selling well and you feel you could build, then make a competing app. It's boring, but it works and it's a good confidence builder. A lot of the advice in this thread is to build some cool new tech, but I'm gonna say that's a bad idea because it's very risky to do that. Sounds like you're trying to find a reliable way to make money. Also, online offerings will need constant babysitting to make sure the site is up etc. iPhone apps on the other hand can be fully self contained with just little updates for new iOS versions and phones needed.
  • thenomad 13y ago
    YES. New = risky. Risky = bad if you're just looking for income. One of the biggest lightbulb moments I ever had in online business was when I realised that if I saw a whole bunch of competitors in a given niche, that meant there was definitely profit to be made there.
    • mixmixmix 13y ago
      Got any other "light bulb" moments to share?
• score 13y ago
  I recently bought a Blackberry because of its built in encryption features. It's a great phone but is missing two popular apps: Evernote and Audible. If you made an app to substitute for either one and charged a few bucks for it, you'll make passive revenues for a long time. Not only that, you'll be loved by crackberry users the world over. Seriously, how many business types subscribe to Audible and to Evernote? And people are looking for more secure communications. It's an incredible opportunity.
• sharemywin 13y ago
  Follow the paper trail. State or Federal governments mandate business regulations. Z new piece of paper work or efiling gets created which someone can create a service to help businesses with.
• jzcoder 13y ago
  Does anyone have experience with what they call "app tender" sites like http://appcity.org/ http://appcity.org/ ? I've heard one anecdote about a guy who knows a guy who bought a very simple iOS app for 10K, did some marketing on FB and made like 20K within a month. I'm more interested in any experience from the developer perspective selling apps on a marketplace like this. I've also heard the new iOS makes this easier to do.
• gab008 13y ago
  Another thing you could try is building dashboards for firms/companies that are plug-able into major databases (Excel also as a "bonus", there are many using Excel as database...). Most will require your board to hook into their ERP system, which is run by a database. The idea it's not new but existing solutions are over-complicated or expensive. Build a few templates and run them in browser (HTML 5, Java Scrip, CSS, database connector, and a scripting language), get them to look good/attractive (I know it's not easy, but hey... it's not that difficult either). I believe most companies will be happy to just invest in a LCD screen, an Android device and your labor - to have the boards displayed on the factory floor or at reception (they can also run presentation slides). As a bonus you can manage the systems remotely - for servicing after installation or changes, if required (another source of income). I know that this is not a really "passive" income idea, but if you get passionate about it, I think that it has the potential of turning out nice. I have build one of this boards for my work place, and I am thinking of putting this into action.
• gesman 13y ago
  Learn PHP and write software for Wordpress, like useful plugin or theme. Distriubute free version to wordpress.org repository and then develop and sell premium version of the same thing on your own. I personally made $100K+ with this approach and it works like a charm.