Ask HN: What is your passive income 2020?
Any side projects, Game, OSS, Hacks.
The screen casting business means continuing to make a few new tutorials per month and making occasional improvements to its site. It sure pays a lot more per hour of my time than it did 18 months ago, though!
The starter kit is still in alpha, so there's a considerable amount of work to do. I'll be raising the price as it hits various milestones, though. Once it's "done", it will be mostly passive other than updating libraries.
Elixir is a rough market since it's very niche but still has a surprising number of authors, conferences and screen casters in its ecosystem who are also creating educational materials.
My MRR is fairly low, but it's just enough to cover my expenses living in Taiwan.
When I have the bandwidth, I'll launch another product which will be still more passive and it won't be limited to only Elixir devs. After that, the plan is to spend some money on outsourcing the editing of my videos and some routine social media tasks.
I guess you are not selling it just yet anyway. Anyhow, since I have multiple projects, going through the setup is hassle and I created started project essentially.
About two dozen people have bought it so far and will get the updates as I build it out. I also gave access for free (at least up through the beta version) to all the people who bought annual Alchemist Camp memberships at the end of last year.
That said, if you've watched all my tutorials there will be nothing new in it except the front-end components that still aren't done.
I don't put it front and center since my first goal is to get people to check out the free content, which is most of it. Eventually learners will usually try clicking on a premium episode, which is where the paywall shows up. The reason I do it this way is so that people will know exactly what they're getting when they sign up.
Also, even getting people learning from the 100+ free screencasts is a plus for me.
The other product is in alpha and the pricing is going up as I hit various milestones. It will probably max out around $250.
My biggest income maker has actually been the least passive: dollhouse furniture[2]. Even then it's only like a couple hours of work a week, and I cleared four figures my first month open (this past month). Plus, it's really fun to design and build tiny furniture.
[0] http://printyay.com [1] http://treeyoself.com [2] http://rathersmall.com
Also, did you create the designs
And yep I do all the designs using a mixture of Illustrator and Procreate on my iPad. :)
My onlyfans makes way less so far, but hope springs eternal.
It's still generating a small amount of ad revenue every month. It used to generate 5-10X what it does now before the days of mobile apps. Back then it was a very meaningful addition to my grad student salary. I had 250K MAU at one point, many of which seemed to be coming from middle and high schools in lower income places that had common computers but presumably not graphing calculators for every student.
It's SORELY out of date with current web tech. Problem is it's not generating enough ad revenue for me to want to go and rewrite it (over working on all my other side projects), and it's not generating little enough for me to want to shut it down -- it's still profitable even if it's just a little.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
- The site is NOT mobile friendly (it wasn't a consideration in 2007), and the specific segment of the population that appeared to be the majority of users (people who had access to computers but didn't own graphing calculators) now have phones and look to their phones for graphing calculator functionality
- There are competitors with better UIs (http://desmos.com/) that sprung up later and seemed to have sweeped up a bunch of users from mine. Mine was, to my knowledge, the first web-based graphing calculator that you could click and drag the graph around with the mouse, and zoom with the scroll wheel.
- There are lots of new features in web browsers that could make it faster, snappier, and also support 3D graphing, which was a popular feature request
- I could base it off React and also release both mobile apps as well as a webapp, since people today seem to prefer native apps to webapps
- It looks outdated compared to modern graphing apps available for iOS and Android
That said, no motivation to do the above unless I had a guaranteed payout. Making graphing calculators isn't what I want to be spending my time on now considering the site is <1% of my income now. Back when I was a grad student, back when it had a lot more users, it was >30% of my total income. If someone gave me 30% of my income now to modernize its UI, I'd do it.
Glad to see a fellow practitioner. Best wishes on your journey!
If not, gz to making your dream.
My portfolio used to be about 50/50 in fixed income securities and real estate. I got lucky with the real estate, and I got out because I didn't think my luck would last forever. Now my portfolio is made up entirely of fixed income securities and blue-chip stocks that pay dividends. The dividends and interest payments are laddered such that I recieve at least 2 payments a month. I didn't choose securities based on payout dates, so the amount does fluctuate from month-to-month. However, the portfolio generates enough monthly income that the "leanest" month is greater than my paycheck's monthly gross income.
Being a software engineer myself, I don't qualify for the Roth accounts so most of my investments are done in a standard taxable account. I don't buy any particular funds -- just a variety of boring bonds and stocks.
I did try the RE (retire early) part a while back. It lasted about 6 months before I got too bored out of my mind. I still continue to work because of the mental stimulation and the social connections.
Just for reference, I was living on less than $750/month until I got married. The companies I worked at had plenty of free food. I didn't need a gym membership because the handyman work I did on my investment properties was more than enough. Until we had kids, my spouse and I were still able to survive on less than $1,000/month. We are based in the south SF Bay Area. We had 100% income replacement by our mid-30s.
Don't get me wrong I like the idea, however the world at large is full of people waiting to ruin the nice things.
They are:
1. SaaS Pegasus: a SaaS boilerplate template for Django projects (https://www.saaspegasus.com/)
2. Place Card Me, a printable place card maker for weddings nad other events (https://www.placecard.me/)
3. Chat Stats: Analytics for GroupMe groups (https://chatstats.co/)
My goal - started three years ago - is to replace my day-job income with passive side-project revenue. Hopefully will do so by 2022 or so!
I publish all my data on profit (as well as time spent and hourly rates) here: https://www.coryzue.com/open/
A couple months back, I got into reading and learning about Ethereum. I never liked it, still don't get the value in blockchains except for Bitcoin.
I have a couple of bots/alerts and some manual strategies to execute on opportunities in some of the DeFi apps, mostly arbitrages. All of my strategies only takes in smart contract risks.
It's surprising how inefficient the market still is. It has made me around a years worth of my work money.
I would suggest reading about the popular Defi apps directly from website, use Twitter. bankless.substack.com is popular among this crowd.
> I imagine you need to be brave enough to have a fair amount of $$$ tied up in ETH
I only maintain exposure to USDC stable coin most of the time except during executing opportunities which usually completes in a couple of transactions.
DeFi also allows for capital less trades, eg: you can borrow $100,000 worth of USDC with no collateral for $90 using flash loans. One strategy is described here - https://blog.instadapp.io/six-percent-instant-return/
First one was Newsy (https://www.newsy.co) - which allows people to turn their un-used domains into something useful - a tool I built for myself first and slowly let others in. It's been a little slow since I'm not doing much marketing, but getting the first ~10 customers was an awesome experience.
Second was my long-term project - SideProjectors (https://www.sideprojectors.com) - a market place for selling & buying side projects - monetized with some standard elements - ads, pro membership, sponsors - all of them turned out to be great way of getting some side income.
It's a Chrome extension that checks multiple pages at a time for common SEO, speed and security issues. I started working on it initially to automate checks I was often doing manually while developing websites for others. Developers I worked with found it useful so I spun it out into its own product. I wrote the online guide on the website too that explains all the web best practices Checkbot tests which I'm trying to turn into an ebook as well.
We just sold our 1500th clock !
Apart from that I'm a french full time software dev
I've been analyzing successful founder interviews for over 2 years now [1] and noticed for 'passive income' projects, usually they either:
a) Stay on top of Google for a few keywords
b) For mobile apps, they get a good ranking on AppStores
c) Are mentioned in some high-authority website as a resource, and that high-authority page ranks for some main keywords on Google
Word of mouth is rarely mentioned and that confirms various research studies [2] that the WOM effect is negligible if you're small.
[1] https://www.firstpayingusers.com
[2] https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/b2b-instit...
- The cost per sale of paid marketing targeting CUSTOMERS is just a little too high to be sustainable right now. Part of that, I think, is because the searching/tagging/categorization of VSUAL isn't great. We can create an ad with interesting art that causes a clickthrough, but if that piece isn't quite compelling enough to sell, we don't do a good job showing similar pieces. We're working on improved tagging and categorization right now to make finding curated, related artworks easier.
- Many of our best selling artists do quite well attracting their own traffic to their store. They already have IG/FB followings significantly greater than our own. So, we're investing in tools to help those artists with marketing (such as markup generators) and to help tools specifically for artists with distribution. For example, those artists who already have distribution want to link people to their shop, not to an entire platform. We're working on building whitelabeled shop pages without the platform nav bar for those partners in particular.
- Finally, I believe that with the amount of UGC on the site, we're currently not taking full advantage of the power of SEO. Creating landing pages specific to art styles and techniques is high on my to-do list after our upcoming tagging improvements are launched. I'm hopeful that moderate SEO improvements can drive our traffic up significantly.
Of course this is not completely passive: she periodically publishes free material to keep attracting people to the funnel. But it's quite rewarding every now and then to have an email saying that some random guy bought the videocourse.
The name is Satura Lanx: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJCYCaXUERhY93xEWC8Cojw
It's going to my retirement fund.
and https://www.bestoftheinternets.com/ send videos and amazon affiliate links to facebook.
I have always used both sites as a sandbox to test out new ideas and practice new programming techniques.
Oh and my biggest passive income comes from Class Action Lawsuits.
What I have learned in the last year or so, is really just focus on what your good at. I wasted so much time silly side projects / unfinished. Figure out what your good and stick with it, in my case it's stocks and algos not connecting to Facebook API to send out silly cat videos. :)
All my software is free. I am trying to publish a children's book. I am also trying to sell a mother's day card idea.
So overall, I'm very unsuccessful. Maybe your execution of these ideas might be better.
https://CSVExplorer.com - Web app for opening big CSV files. Months of work to build, but now just a few hours of support a week.
https://TheSimplePostcard.com - Send Postcards via text message. A few weeks of work, now mostly passive.
~$120 / month in passive income between adverts and the $3 option to buy the ad-free version.
The only real effort is keeping up with Google's constant deprecation of their libraries.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.roobr.retr...
A mailing list is nice because you're actually collecting emails and can use them somehow in the future. You could collect emails and then send users a welcome email that also promotes your IG channel. It just wasn't obvious you have an IG channel. Hopefully this is helpful.
It’s weekly trivia quizzes via Slack or email for work teams to build connection!
- college professor office hours
- open enrollment consultations
- comedy open mics
- auditions & interviews
- startup accelerator mentor meetings
- any kind of one-on-one meetings
- potluck parties
- volunteer signups
- pizza orders
I started monetizing in 2015 and now earn 5-figures averaging < 5 hours or effort per month. Now and then I do a batch of work to add a new feature.
Once I get my drop shipping and white labeling agreement with the 3D printing company it will be much more passive, since now I am receiving and shipping all the rings.
I'm looking around for some slightly less passive ways of making a modest income that don't turn the slider all the way to "start and run a business."
I'm now planning on starting a python development blog, and I hope I can sell some courses if I'm able to drive an audience. I teach CS (next year part-time) on a local college and I have some tutorials and lab exercises for my students (some of which I shared at the full-speed python ebook [6])..
Edit: forgot that the fine guys at educative.io send my a monthly payment of about ~100€ for the full-speed python course at their platform [7]. I guess I'm much better at coming up with programming tutorials than with business ideas..
Some day my luck will improve! :)
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flatangle....
[2] http://elements.flatangle.com/
~3k/mo split between the following:
OLD content site in a specific niche - affiliate earnings* Domain earnings via ads (this is a loss for sure though because I spend more than this in domain renewals) 2 sites in various drug niches (affiliate) Adsense from a network of ??? sites Fiverr gig (article on a blog) * A variety of affiliate sites (amazon mainly)*
*split with a partner
Probably cover my domain expenses by selling a domain every once in a while too.
Some of these used to be full time projects that I stopped caring about. Very nice to have spitting out money still. I have been cranking crap out for 20 years and rarely shut any of it down completely unless it is does not cover the $10/year for the domain/hosting and even then I usually keep them going if I like the domain.
Trading bot based on dividends https://BigBalli.com/dividend
Expanding to full acquisition toolkit / training with established entrepreneurs.
I haven't spent much time on it lately and there are a few things I need to fix but I have been too busy.
While I am not in the black with the project (even if I consider my time as free) it still helps be think about other streams of income that maybe aren't passive but can be tied into my hobbies so will feel much less like work.
Also, because my app uses API Gateway and Lambda as a backend, Amazon gives me a $100 credit on my AWS account every month to cover the costs. My costs for the app are about $10/month, so the other $90 are used for various other activities.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/borderr/id1469575317
Was a fun exercise to learn SwiftUI
Truly thankful for this automated income as I am able to support my parents with this. My dad is unable to find work due to so much uncertainty in the economy.