Ask HN: Freelancers who transitioned to passive income, how did you do it?

Try to package up as a product the experience you're selling when you're doing consultancy work e.g. as a book, a SaaS, a mobile app, an online course. Jumping between companies as you freelance lets you see common pain points that you could address and manual work that you could create a product for to automate. It's probably harder to do this if you're on a salary in the same company on the same project for years too.

https://www.checkbot.io/ is a paid Chrome extension I built that automates many of the checks I used to do manually during contracts when optimising the SEO, speed and security of websites. I found many developers and content editors on websites I worked with weren't checking for web best practices because of lack of knowledge + time and because doing manual checks is error-prone + tedious.

I have an Amazon affiliate site that I've posted about previously. As the other poster suggested, passive is a bit of a myth, its actually quite a bit of work. But its always at my pace and no one is looking over my shoulder. I can craft things in the winter when I'm at home a lot (I live in Wisconsin), and then they make me money in the summer when I don't want to put in as much work. It's enjoyable work, I virtually meet a lot of wonderful leather crafters (its a watch strap website), and its fun to post about stuff they have created. Some of it is incredibly beautiful. All in all I like it as a side project, but I'm not sure if it could ever replace my job income totally. It would be placing too much importance on one vendor.