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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

I co-wrote a book on user acquisition and co-created an accompanying video course to climb out of debt left over from a failed startup.

Made $104,000 in revenue since June (turns out the user acquisition stuff actually works), about 87k of which is profit, so we'll say ~$11,000/month part-time. It still makes me a solid $2,000/month now with zero work, and hopefully more once the book is officially published. (It's done and delivered to backers, but won't be on bookshelves and Amazon until after it's typeset.)

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-ultimate-growth-hacki...

I know the marketing will be over-the-top for HN. Just know it sells because the content is really, really good.

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Vincent Dignan, one of the worst twitter spammer I've ever blocked (more than once since he likes/liked to ignore complaints, open a new account and do it again...to the same people!).

If spamming all of twitter in alphabetical order is an example of the growth hacks....

I see the account he used to do most of the spamming has been suspended by Twitter now https://twitter.com/vdignan

Would you not spam Twitter if you were in debt and could make 11k/mo? I agree it's lame but gotta pay the bills :)

There are alternatives to wasting thousands of people's time, such as getting a salaried job doing something that's a net positive for society.

I know that I wouldn't. It's called moral compass and knowing how it would make the internet a shittier place the more people it would do.

> I agree it's lame but gotta pay the bills :) reply.

Yep. And like Floyd Mayweather said, "Skills pay the Bills." Like it or not, Mr Vincent Dugnan is very skilled at making 11,000 / month spamming on twitter and social networks. So that's that.

You can deal crack too, it pays the bills.

Ya, we had a sit down about that and I made him stop. It does work, but I don't care

>I co-wrote a book on user acquisition and co-created an accompanying video course to climb out of debt left over from a failed startup.

I hope the startup didn't fail because it couldn't attract users?

No, it failed because even with 500k users/month it couldn't make money

Grasswire? I used to go there sometimes (found it through your blog posts), and being in a similar space I'd agree that the news/article traffic is extremely tough to monetize. We've since slightly pivoted and are confident we're on the right track now. I'm also glad you found your thing!

Can you answer me a quick question? I notice you use the Twitter widget/embed on Grasswire. How do you like it?

I've always felt it was kind of redundant to show the same content that's already on the site. The reason why I'm asking is because while doing my "due diligence" about blogging/bloggers (our target market after the pivot), I've noticed that a solid 10-15% of all blogs use it (or a similar widget from Pinterest or FB). I can see how they CAN be useful, but the fact that they are mostly "consumption only" and mostly curated by one person, means that there is a lot of room to improve them, which is exactly what we're trying to do with our community platform. I'd love to partner up/work together and join forces in some way. Let me know!

Yes, Grasswire.

Honestly Grasswire is now entirely open sourced/crowdsourced and I haven't touched it in the past ~year or so, so I haven't really been involved in that decision making process and don't have a strong opinion.

I don't really run Grasswire, it's kind of an open collective community, so you can convince people to participate but we can't really "partner" with anyone easily.

Making money selling a book isn't proof that the content of the book contains good advice for making money.

Not directly, but the main method of driving revenue was giving away the first few chapters. We know almost exactly how many sales we'll drive based on how many people read those chapters.

I would really like to buy a digital copy of this book now, is that possible?

Yes, the starter pack on the link I provided gets you a digital copy of the book.

Writing a book is not exactly passive.

I'm going to assume from your reply that you've just not heard the term before but passive income refers to income from something where you do the work up front and it continues to pay down the road.

A book is a perfect example of that.

I'm trying to work out what would count as passive enough to satisfy the grandparent commenter, if writing a book doesn't qualify. Maybe inheritance? Even robbing a bank requires some upfront effort, so it's hardly passive.

2k/mo with zero work is indeed passive.

A new book is not a perfect example of that, it's a shitload of work - very likely more work per dollar earned than a day job. Passive income is related to using capital rather than effort to generate money. If the IP of the book was passed down to his kids and they continued to make money off it, or enough money was made from it to surpass a regular working wage for the hours spent, maybe then it becomes "passive". Right now it's just a lot of underpaid effort on credit.

You are correct that it is not passive income in traditional sense, but in HN, "the passive income" has come to mean something that generates automatic revenue after the initial work without requiring significant maintenance/upkeep work.

The prime example of passive income used here is patio11's Bingo Card Creator.

One also could say that in traditional investing, the upfront work is the research work to find right index funds or buying property in real estate investing. They might be less work than writing a book, but revenues e.g. from passive index fund investing are also significantly less than from writing a book, if your starting capital is small.

> One also could say that in traditional investing, the upfront work is the research work to find right index funds or buying property in real estate investing

This is the key point. In absolutes there is no such thing as passive income. Anything will take at least 1s of effort, and $0.001 of capital. The spirit of the term, is income that is heavily skewed towards being generated from assets rather than effort.

A new book is the edge case. While making money off IP is generally the perfect example of passive income. Quitting a job to become an author, is not. There is an implied lack of effort and cost in the question. Additionally, and importantly, there needs to be a sense of "free" in there.

The prototypical case:

- [bust your ass at work] >> [get evened out with paycheck] >> ["free!" passive income from savings]

New book case:

- [bust your ass writing] >> [nothing, world still owes you] >> ["free?" passive income from book IP]

Until the "nothing" gets filled in with the equivalent of a salaried wage, I'm not a fan of calling it "passive income".

> Until the "nothing" gets filled in with the equivalent of a salaried wage, I'm not a fan of calling it "passive income".

Would you also consider creating a static "how to" site that generates revenue from ads to not be passive income? I think that's the most basic example of what HN considers passive.

I think it depends where you are in the cycle. If you just finished putting in 50hrs of work, and have so far made $100, I wouldn't consider that true passive income. Fast-forward a year, and your income from the site has surpassed $2500 (the equivalent of your salaried wage for those hours), with minimal additional effort - now you are making passive income.

We're just defining words here anyway. I think a core component of what people think of when they think "passive income" is making a disproportional amount of income relative to effort put in. Until those proportions get dis'ed, you're just working at a sub-optimal job.

Yes, and not only is it not passive, but you actually have to say something interesting, which means you have to have some business knowledge in some field. And even then, it actually makes money only if it works. Which is rare, probably more rare than a successful startup depending on the specific domain you are writing about.

Yeah thats exactly what you should do to promote something like this.

Tell anyone how much you made with your own tipps without proof/proof of your specific case and use it to sell it

Well, looks like it got $103k in crowd funding, so it's not totally unsubstantiated.

What part of "$103,892 USD total funds raised" on the provided link was difficult to parse?

And why assume the other is lying? This Ask HN is specifically about passive income, and calls for people to share their profits. It's not about them posting their IRS returns or other proof. If you're gonna doubt them, might as well skip the whole post.

It is the same crap Tim Ferriss is doing. People like the idea, think they can use it as well only to never understand that they are a part of a pyramid scheme which is ultra flat and has only him or someone like Tim Ferriss on top.

If it's ultra flat then it's not a pyramid scheme. It's only a pyramid scheme if it trickles down to ever diminishing returns.

At worse, what you describe is a snake oil sale.

But people can genuinely learn things from this or from Tim Ferris work too, so it's more like any self-help book/product sale basically. As long as it contains useful stuff that the buyer didn't know before on their own, it's legit for me.

Of course if the content is good, it still relies on the determination of those applying it. And some luck besides.

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