Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017?

64 pointsxcoding42 comments

Any side internet projects, blogging, web app, Hacks.

- Improvely (https://www.improvely.com) and W3Counter (https://www.w3counter.com) are my SaaS apps and make about $600K ARR. I check the support e-mail twice a day on weekdays and once a day on weekends. There's typically less than 20 minutes a day of work. One day a week I block a few hours to hack on new features or tweak ads or something productive.

- I have a couple open source projects, and hosted "webmaster tools" type projects, with one-page websites like http://www.daterangepicker.com that get ~10K visits/day, and run one AdSense ad on each page, which brings in a couple hundred dollars most months.

- I run a web store where I resell another company's products (with permission) targeted at a different customer group than their own website. I advertise it on Google AdWords and Bing Ads on just a handful of keywords. Fulfillment is automated through the other company, so I haven't touched the store except to update the design every few years, and it brings in $500-$1000/month in profit. Sorry, don't want to link to this one, too easy to copy.

- Dividends from stocks and high-dividend-yield index funds are totally passive. But first you have to earn and save the money to invest in them. I also have some money in REITs, investing in real estate without having to buy and manage the real estate.

- I used to run some referral ads on my sites for a merchant account provider I used 5-10 years ago. A couple businesses signed up through those links and still use that company for their credit card processing. The commission agreement was a lifetime residual based on their monthly processing volume... I'm still getting $100-200 transferred into my bank every month from that company even though I haven't been referring anyone to them for years.

Extremely impressive list, do you mind me asking how you initially get the projects off the ground in terms of users / traffic?

Also as a side note, thank you for daterangepicker! I've integrated it into a couple little things I've built like chrome extensions and absolutely love it.

* W3Counter: I started "Website Goodies" as a content and tools site for webmasters in the 1990s. It had articles about learning HTML, learning JavaScript, and basically whatever else I myself was learning at the time back then. It also had a tools page, with things like guestbooks and surveys and a website hit counter I hosted. They were initially Perl CGI scripts, then later rewritten in PHP when I learned that. The traffic all came from search engines and organic links. The counter was pretty popular, and I wanted better web stats for my own sites without paying for them -- this was before Google bought Urchin and made Google Analytics out of it, when good web stats still cost money. So I made W3Counter, and linked to it heavily from Website Goodies, which got it off the ground. 100% word of mouth since then, I've never advertised it.

* Improvely got its first customers from Google ads. Because Improvely has a high CLV (customer lifetime value), I could spend a lot on advertising to acquire a customer and still make money from it. So that's what I did. Once I had a couple dozen customers, who were all delighted with the product and the support, word of mouth started taking over. These days 90% of new signups are referrals from an existing/past customer, or referrals from some website that's written an article or review mentioning Improvely. I still run some Google ads but with a limited budget.

* The open source projects get their traffic from Stack Overflow, forums, people searching NPM and other repositories, etc. The Date Range Picker widget got its initial traffic from a "Show HN" post I did here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4408070

I've started other SaaS apps that never worked out. The thing that made them different from Improvely and W3Counter is that nobody was super excited about them. Nobody loved those products; they were maybe useful but not the best at anything and not particularly unique. So the word of mouth referrals never came, churn was high, and eventually I shut them down and tried something else.

Really informative, thank you!

I'm jelly. Congrats on your achievement. How many saas have you started that did not fizzle out? Also, for the 600K what is your profit on that? Was that just in the last couple of years (getting 600K/year) or already a long time?

> I've started other SaaS apps that never worked out.

We need more stories and details about such endeavors, but unfortunately most don't write about it.

Btw, how do you monetize the Date Range Picker?

> Btw, how do you monetize the Date Range Picker?

The AdSense ad on the documentation website

It gets quite a bit of traffic -- https://www.w3counter.com/stats/90840/dashboard

Interesting. I was thinking most people from the target audience (tech) would have ad blockers installed. I can't imagine being a more or less tech-savvy and not using an ad blocker.

The most popular ad blockers also block W3Counter's tracking script, so those 110K monthly views it counted are just the people not running a blocker. Who knows how many more people visited but weren't counted.

> Who knows how many more people visited but weren't counted.

Yes, although this is irrelevant regarding monetization (with adsense).

I am unemployed, I won't mind doing your low tech shores . I have an online shop but I made less than 90USD.

I'm very envious of what you've achieved, I actually wanted to start a SaaS doing almost the same as what w3counter does, but I figured because products like yours that the market wasn't worth attempting.

I have to be honest here. Posts like this kind of confuse me - you're basically asking people to either share their secret sauce so others can copy it, or to provide vague descriptions that won't help overly much building your own passive income.

Anyway, I'll get this started even though it's not what you're probably looking for: my best passive income is rental properties. I purchased a small house in Florida that is now renting for all costs + a few hundred a month, and will be adding a second property in a few months. It's about as low-maintenance as a SaaS side business and required basically zero marketing to get a "user".

Not all passive income is 'secret sauce'. People write eBooks or offer paid services based on their skill set and so on - and often the HN exposure helps get them known, and is interesting to see for us readers.

Unfortunately, all of the best moneymakers probably won't get shared, because the people don't want competitors.

I don't have any real passive income, myself, but one of my buddies has a pretty sweet setup.

He wrote a bunch of trading bots that would automatically perform arbitrage between all of the bitcoin exchanges. He wrote a variety of bots with different strategies, and then he would lease them out to people and take a cut of the profits (in addition to doing his own arbitrage trading with his extra money). From the sound of it, he was making some serious cash (like thousands of dollars a day).

Sorry, I'm going to have a hard time believing this without more detail. How can you arbitrage across countries? There are many people in the Bitcoin space that bring this up all the time because they see the big price differences between US, China, India... but the only way to profit off this is to deposit cash in one county, withdraw it in another currency, then convert back your your national one.

Getting fired from my job. ;) Got 1 month severance and a job the same week.

By far the best passive income so far this year.

http://www.ferryschedules.co

As someone who commutes via ferry, I got sick of checking the official schedule of my ferry because it's not mobile friendly and was slow. Then I noticed more of the official schedule sites are typically in pdf, slow, not optimized for mobile devices or all of the above. So I've been slowly putting some of the schedules on this site over the past week. While not fully passive, the schedules will only have to be updated a couple of times per year since they change fairly infrequently.

It is just monetized via Google Adsense right now, but already paid for itself with a couple of ad clicks and when all said and done it should be some decent beer money every month.

Next steps are to learn how to automate the monitoring of the official schedule sites, so I can automate the updating of my site to match the official schedules. That would make it more passive.

A cursory Google search suggests you could use a package like poppler to convert the pdf to raw text, and then in theory use regex to create data your server could use and serve.

If the pdfs are published as scans like so many municipalities do, then OCR is the only way to go.

Either way, good luck and decently nice design.

I really appreciate you taking a look as well as providing your feedback.

Regarding the design, I just wanted to get something out the door quickly with a suitable look out of the box, so I decided to use MaterializeCSS (http://materializecss.com/). It's getting the job done so far, but I may revisit the design after I get all the content up.

And I'll look into poppler. Thank you for the recommendation.

If the timetables aren't particularly easy to read or parse, OCR is going to be potentially wrong so you're going to have to check it, so you might as well do it manually whilst there's no clean technical way of doing it (maybe contact the companies if you get big numbers and ask about an arrangement?). You could setup a script, on a VPS if you're doing it that way, that checks the PDF daily, and if the file changes it notifies you - that'd be fairly trivial to setup.

Most of my income currently comes from:

1) ~45% - Two hand-selected ads on a major developer website. These were individual deals with the companies placing the ad.

2) ~5% - Ad network ads on two websites.

3) ~45% - Rental income from my house on AirBnB.

I wish I could say that these were clever projects or startups, but I haven't yet found a "traditional" software side project that makes money. I have one that's been running for a little over a year, although I haven't figured out how I want to actually charge for it. People are just using it on a free tier right now.

Dash (https://www.dash.org/). Currently return is just over 10% ROI per Master Node (just a full node Bitcoin client running on a server for a few $$ a year). Aside from the 100%+ increase in the currency since I bought it, running five Master Nodes nets about $10,000 a year of passive income.

That is really more of a speculative bet than passive income.

CLM. The dividend has paid my water, fiber and half my electricity every month while I've been out of work. Pretty nice!

CLM?

Stock: https://www.google.com/finance?q=clm

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/cornerstone-funds-announce-con...

Supposedly has an 18% yield, which is pretty darn good. What's the catch?

I have no idea. From what I've made on the dividend + buying it and selling it, it could go to zero and I'd still have made money on it. Admittedly I bought it without much due diligence. Just wanted something to park my savings in for a while and some stock screener shenanigans led me to it. Robinhood has really made it easy for me to make silly decisions. Oh well, lucked out on this one.

Thanks for the honesty and sharing your tip. :)

Did you pick exclusively for the hefty dividend? Not sure how sustainable that will be, expensive to own too.

I wrote a stock screener when I graduated from college years ago. It's an ensemble of technical analysis, moonbat garbage and horseshit. I ran it looking for a mixture of absurd dividends and lowish beta. CLM's just what I settled on.

Can you elaborate on `expensive to own`? The taxes are a little onerous, but maybe you mean something beyond that.

I have an ad-supported informational site that provides some healthcare data, which is updated annually. I have found that some refresh occurs with Google search rankings for data like this. We are still only talking about hundreds of dollars each month with my offering, but I believe this annual cycle has helped my site compete with some of the longer-standing competition. I've noticed a similar trend with a seasonal sports site I have. There seems to be a window of opportunity each year if you are able to craft your SEO to take advantage of search spikes specific to the season/year.

And these are truly passive in the sense that the hard work of building the site is done, and I only have to do a quick updated once each year and then sit back and rake in ... hundreds!

Should active projects really considered passive income?

I'd consider passive something that requires virtually no involvement: stocks, bonds, real estate, etc

YTD by revenue:

Stock > Job > Books > Affiliate Websites

Stocks are auto-invested each month.

Job is not passive.

Books were written a while ago. Some by me most by others. Probably a couple hours a week evaluating how they're doing. Sometimes I'll do sales, etc. Less passive as I'm trying to grow their revenue.

Affiliate websites are all 100% passive at this point. I automatically generate content for them. Maybe an hour or two updating the VPS/WP.

By stocks, do you mean an index fund, or individual stocks, or some combination of the two?

Mostly Index funds as well as some individual stocks (TSLA, BRK.B, AAPL).

~5k is auto invested in an index/mo.

After 3 months the visually lossless image optimization tool Optimage (http://getoptimage.com) I'm developing in my free time has started to bring ~200$/month. Hoping to resolve the last performance issues and launch a server edition.

If you can give me a proper linux-based command line client for optimizing images, I'd buy it.

I'll let you know. There's a newsletter for major updates, or you can ping me via email (in profile).

Hopefully a brand new blog talking about my half-baked and fully-baked projects from past and future, in that cultivating a more public profile for my not-so-many years to come.

I can buy a coffee at the end of the month with http://www.learn-2-type.com

-Woodworking -Teaching older people on how to use Feature phones/Smart phones

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