Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2018?
Any side projects, Game, OSS, Hacks.
Happy you can work on it full time.
2 months of that (part time) was the initial build and the rest was hustling to get initial users. GitHub wouldn't put it in the GitHub Marketplace (which drives pretty much all signups now - I don't do any marketing or sales) until it had 250 users and it was a struggle getting the word out to that many people. In the end I did it by commenting on relevant open source PRs on GitHub asking if they'd be up for giving it a try (being really careful not to be spammy).
I really like the idea! Keep up the good work :)
It's an affiliate income model, and it makes me enough to buy groceries and have a few nights out a month. It's much more fun than I expected it to be though. Turns out there are a lot of custom leather workers out there doing watch straps as a hobby and they produce AMAZING work, just incredible. Stingray leather, horween, lizard, I had no idea this stuff existed before I started. They are also a lot of fun to contact and hear their stories, so now I send them interview questions by email and post those. All in all I'm very happy with it. I got my inspiration from this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/
How did you decide on a niche?
How did you research your niche?
How long have you been doing it?
How did you do keyword research and such?
How much content do you write/produce?
Do you do reviews? If so whats your method?
Who are your affiliates? It sounds like you work with independent strap makers, how does being compensated for sales work with them?
How long did you blog before you started seeing a profit?
Do you think one day you’d be on track to promote your own watch/strap?
How did you make the actual site?
Thanks in advance. Hope you dont mind the questions
The research wasn't very hard. I bought some straps and installed them to get the hang of it. Its actually very easy, and now they make quick release straps, so you can change out your strap every day if you want. Mostly it's a fashion blog, so the companies do the work for me by putting out great photography.
I've been doing it about a year and a half. The first 6 months I hardly made money and almost gave up, but then I wrote a popular article and managed to rank quickly and and people purchase watches through it.
I don't really do keyword research. Most of my money comes from two or three articles, one of which is about a particular watch. So I could write more articles about other watches when I have the time. But I have a full-time job that I love, so I only do this for fun. I've done some advertising on Pinterest that seems to have been useful, and Pinterest itself brings in visitors.
I used to write a lot of content but got a new position at my full time job that's been taking up a ton of time. When things settle down I'll write more. Other people hire writers, I'm not sure about that just yet. I don't do reviews, mainly because I didn't want to handle the shipping of bands back and forth. Seems weird to keep the review bands, although plenty of companies have offered free bands I've never accepted any.
I'm an Amazon affiliate, and also Etsy & Jomashop (a popular online watch seller) and one or two others that I've never got a sale from. I usually don't get compensated from featuring independent strapmakers, unless someone buys through Etsy. But they provide the interviews and a lot of great photography, so I basically feature them for free. The blog would be boring otherwise and they're very talented artists and fun to work with. Check out Combat Straps (https://www.combat-straps.com/GALLERY.html) or Jones in Tokyo (https://www.etsy.com/shop/JonesInTokyoLeather) and you'll see what I mean.
I'm not interested in my own straps or watches, there are enough people doing that already so I'll stick with my quiet little niche. My website is just a WordPress theme.
Hope that helps. Check out the reddit link for r/juststart. It really is very informative and fun. This is my second business. The first one was an iPad travel magazine that failed miserably and never made a profit, but was also a lot of fun.
After making next to nothing with Google ads, I was approached by another site that sold help packages for the licensing process and we struck up an affiliate deal. It didn't work right away and had to build up, but nowadays it generates anywhere from $200 to $800 per month in completely passive revenue (haven't written a new post in years). The revenue has been growing too. It will have done about $5k in 2018.
I recall it sold about $2k right after release, as Product Hunt happened to have just opened a book section back then and it got to #1 place for a day. I put it on Amazon, iBooks and Gumroad. Basically all the initial sales were from Gumroad.
But the cool thing is that although comparatively sales slowed to a trickle, now 3 years later it's still selling about $10 worth each month, now completely from iBooks and Amazon. It's not much, but at this point it's completely passive.
So the odd thing? While I was writing it I had just crossed 1000 subscribers myself. But after I released the book, I soon found out that a lot of my subscribers were actually using stolen card numbers and I had to cancel about a third.
So now I have a book out about how to get 1000 subscribers, but I don't actually have 1000 subscribers, and turns out I never really did, although I was convinced of it while writing it. It feels a bit like karma from being too proud too soon.
Your subscribers were using stolen cards?
So technically you did have subscribers they were just committing fraud to pay you?
I imagine it would do well with the trivia crowd
might also work to feature some amazon products (books, maps, globes, …).
i wonder how to drive more traffic. maybe a social (media) aspect like inviting friends/posting scores.
I have a lot of ideas for small interesting websites like this, but I've no clue how to popularize them at all. Maybe a Show HN or something, but that seems like a short burst if the site is more of a novelty.
In first year, I maybe leaved link on one or two subreddits, with not too many subscribers. I had little bit of traffic from reddit.
I had this url also in signature in 2 discussion boards, but boards were in Croatian language. So only little bit of traffic from there.
Then after some time I got better Google ranking. (there was no too much similiar sites there, so it was easy to get better ranking).
Once someone on 4chan or similair chan site posted link.
Basically, it has grown without marketing/advertising. But still, it is small site.
Revenue peaked at $20k/month 2 years ago and is less than half of that now. That's probably because my SEO rankings plummeted this year, and that people seem less and less eager to pay for online courses. Maintaining the course is quite passive (answering students' questions by email) but growing revenue is an active process.
If you want to succeed on Udemy, you need multiple courses and cross-selling. It will be good to partner a current Udemy instructor for your first course and build on top of his audience.
Revenue from Udemy is generally on the decline. But nonetheless, you can always start on Udemy and branch out to your own site later. I did that.
Are you qualifications ever questioned?
Do you think anyone with a self evaluated passion and knowledge of a subject can teach a course online?
How did you entice people tk buy your course? How did you market? Build a reputation?
Many online teachers think they are not good enough because they compare themselves to the top 1% in the field. But even if they are far behind the top 1%, they are far ahead of the bottom 50% and their teaching is still valuable.
Sometimes, they turn out to be better teachers than the top 1% because they are nearer to their students level and can empathise and hence teach in a more effective manner.
2. Rarely. Some students ask for my trading background and performance. I'll tell them the truth. Don't be afraid they will think you are under-qualified. If they do feel that way, they won't enroll and move on. There are plenty of people who will enroll in your course regardless of your qualification (I only realised this after I started teaching).
3. Yes.
4. I did an interview piece, you can find more info on how I started there: https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-lucas-liew-of-algo...
How many pieces did you have to produce to make 50k?
Passive income is defined as high upfront work and very low maintenance work. Other than possible marketing tasks the author's job is done once the book is published and collects money on every sale.
Authoring a book, sure. But the parent poster implied that he/she continuously writes these stories, i.e. many of them, hence why they said it is "hard on the imagination".
I mean I'm still getting paid for the features I wrote for my company's software two years ago!
If you're going to buy a first house, it's worth it to go for a multifamily; up to four units you can still get in under FHA, you just have to live in one for a couple of years.
I for one could probably only afford to be a landlord of a 250-400k property here in NY, not a 700k one!
It's not that common, but it's a possible outcome, and a contract won't help even a little bit.
Strong lease agreements, property management, and vetting the right tenants will avoid 99% of these issues... but you can only do so much to prevent these issues from arising. I account for 3-5% vacancy every month as part of expenses and don't touch that money for this very reason.
It's made a few dollars from affiliate links so far.
> I'm adding recommendations and products daily. Do you add the recommendations manually or do you use a crawler/API to copy the comment? How automatic is it?
Finally, I have two suggestions: You're only selling to people in the US. Maybe you could also add links to other Amazon domains (or use a service like geni.us)?
And how about linking back to the comment thread? Sometimes, a comment only makes sense in its context, and I couldn't find a link back.
Amazon has a service called OneLink that supposedly routes users to the Amazon store that's closest to their country (presumably, from their IP address). I'm using it (a simple script tag) but I don't know how reliable it is.
At least for me, OneLink doesn't work. Apparently you need to be in the US, Canada or UK; the other countries aren't supported so far. Pity.
But even so, that would kind of defeat the purpose; I don't just want to aggregate recommendations. I want to include, more so, the ones that are interesting than frequent.
Additionally, besides books, I'll be posting other types of recommendations (travel, hardware, etc.).
At first I only charged $12/month or $96/year. As the library of screencasts grew, I raised prices to $15/month or $135/year and I'll probably raise prices again pretty soon. So far, it's been slow, steady growth and nobody has unsubscribed.
I think a key thing that helped me is that I made very different content from the other Elixir screencasters. They all focused on short, highly-edited content that taught specific language features or small libraries and I chose a project-based approach where I introduced language features as needed and videos sometimes reached nearly an hour. It made my service a bit less of a rival good to the others and instead something that people might buy in addition to one of my competitors.
In 11 months of 5-10 hours a week, Alchemist Camp is covering the rent and it's also lead to me meeting a few famous Elixir devs, including José Valim! Definitely a fun indiehack and I'm glad I'm doing it.
Even investing takes up-front work in the form of research and to actually setup the investment.
Sure, appreciating assets are the best passive income, but the income is a function of how much money you already had / how shrewdly you picked the asset / how much research you put into it (back to work). I think the underlying ideal here is “passive income through talent, wit, or execution” - passive income that you’re earning based on your skills and ideas (or ridiculous dumb luck) not your existing money.
I opted for the second, so I haven’t done even a single side project in my life and have completely focused on my full time job. It allowed me to quickly grow my net worth and now I’m in the 7 figures after 8 years of full time work, and the effect of having large assets invested in index funds can be felt now.
So, I humbly think my “strategy” is also a form of “passive income through talent, wit, or execution”. I’m 100% sure that if I dabbled with side ideas and put in the hundreds of hours required to write books, courses, ... I wouldn’t have been able to obtain the impact I had at my job, so my net worth would be significantly lower.
As I said though, I thought about it a lot so I haven’t necessarily come to the conclusion that it’s the best thing to do, there are certainly other factors that go in side projects, such as personal satisfaction, pride and sense of ownership, which are only relative when contributing to an employer.
I’m thinking about writing a new one, but I’m not sure about the topic.
It’s somewhat more consistent than the appreciation/depreciation of the underlying securities due to the recent volatility, and I get the distribution straight into my bank account, which I usually just reinvest since I have a full time job that easily supports my expenses.
Dividend yield based on the current high valuations is pretty low though, I believe for my portfolio is around 2%, but hopefully in the long term that’ll be just a small portion of the returns.
Referencing this sort of thing: http://www.parrotsecrets.com/
An explainer: https://www.cringely.com/2009/03/14/parrot-secrets/
General guideline from Russel Branson's "Expert Secrets": Pick one of the 3 major hot markets (health, wealth, relationships), pick a sub-market, then create a new niche in that sub-market (not recommended, but you might succeed competing with an existing niche).
"Stop your Divorce" [2] was written in the same way, and seems to have sold pretty well. (Also netted the counselor a lot of leads because his phone # was in the book.)
Interestingly, there's a counter argument to the advice presented in the "Parrot Secrets" book: [3]
[1]: https://shop.stackingthebricks.com/sales-safari-101
[2]: http://www.stopyourdivorce.com/
[3]: http://goodbirdinc.blogspot.com/2013/06/internet-fraud-targe...
- Membership fees and sponsored posts on https://thefootytipster.com (I maintain the WP site, but no real ongoing work) (roughly £300 per month)
- Advertising on my tech blog https://tosbourn.com (roughly £30 per month)
- Advertising on https://howoldistheinter.net (roughly £15 per month) - zero effort put into this once made and one redesign
I'm hoping to grow https://cbdscores.com over the next few months and add it to the list.
On a serious note 400 USD us probably good enough for a fresher (to be honest its way more than average) but its quite less for a mid-level engineer.
How long did it take you to develop the app ?
Bought 3 student apartments in 2012 (when I was 24) and finished paying them at the beginning of 2018.
The apartments are entirely managed by an agency that finds the student, collects the money, does all the maintainance, and give me a fixed, guaranteed income.
This income is about 50% of what the students pay (about 330€ for me when the student pays 600).
So now I have 1000€ of passive income per month and only need to do my accounts once a year.
(In France, you can use a company to rent your apartments and avoid paying taxes, so I do that)
I'll probably buy 2 or 3 more in the future to be able to "retire early" and become an indie game dev full time.
- I've got several android apps at https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=leoncvlt. together they bring in about £80 a month. One of them, however, was recently picked as 'editor's choice' by google and this month alone brought in £600, hopefully it keeps some of that steam.
- Built https://cosflowy.com/ in the last year, my biggest project to date which ironically brings in the least, just enough to pay for server costs. Need to do more marketing work, but I find it twice as tiring than actual development itself.
Lots of small things but no golden bullets yet. I'll keep trying!
I publish them myself, yes - there is a "press" I put them under but its just me. I have a few friends who do reviews and I am also on several academic mailing lists
http://emailmeapp.net http://www.digitalphotoframeapp.com https://www.peopletrackerapp.com
I did some initial marketing and it's been bringing in steady income of about $200 every month. I've sold out of inventory multiple times and keep ordering bigger and bigger batches of sketchpads each time.
Subscription revenue is about $500/month.
There isn't a direct link. You may find my models under Models->Designer Models (https://www.portfolio123.com/app/r2g) and then filter by my username - wwasilev.
Anyone know where to find good technical content writers?
https://image.ibb.co/b75uVL/B77-D6-BA2-7-EBB-4645-8946-C5-C8...