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Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

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Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#101

Post by Vivtek »

nostromo wrote: post #40

Real estate. (Ok, not 100% passive, but what is?) You can buy a duplex for not much more than a single family house in many US cities and, thanks to the low interest rates for an owner-occupied mortgage, rent out half and live for free. Unlike tech, you will not have a giant windfall with real estate; but also unlike tech, it's very easy to price your product, find customers, and figure out what your cashflow will be…

A word of caution: unless you have the personal skills to deal with tenants, do not make the mistake of thinking that real estate is passive income. Like any earning occupation, landlording takes attention to detail, the ability not to procrastinate, and people skills. Unlike most occupations, landlording will bring you into contact with some of the worst people the planet has to offer, under what has to be the worst possible set of circumstances. If you want to lose your faith in humanity, I encourage you to take up landlording.

There are easier ways to live rent-free, unless, as I say, you have the personal skills to ride herd on grown children or if you are lucky enough to own your property in an area where normal people rent, and you can find good tenants on a regular basis.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#102

Post by intended »

ashray wrote: post #97

I started a site 13 years ago and it is one of the largest sites in it's niche right now. Very very popular. I do work on it many hours a week (can range from 0 to 100 hours/week) but I don't really have to. I just love working on it, adding new features, etc. I would definitely call the work passive or hobbyist - even though sometimes I'm up till 4 in the morning working on X new feature. Income is in the early 5 di…

Hobbyist would be the better category for it.

At a variable range of 0-100 hours a week, your top end is very far removed from the passive income part of the question.

In this case the average number of hours per month may make more sense to discuss.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#103

Post by sinak »

Two friends and I started http://repeaterstore.com straight out of college. Within a year it was profitable, and within 3 it was doing $3 million in revenue (and about a 15% profit margin). It's pretty much stabilized since then, and we hired a manager to monitor the operation. Most stock is shipped through drop shoppers, we just have 2 customer support people to handle phone calls and emails. Forthe last 2 years we've been working on new, more interesting startups - but having a stable source of income has been incredibly valuable in letting us bootstrap until we could raise funds from VCs. Niche eCommerce can be awesome.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#104

Post by spiredigital »

I'd have to say my two eCommerce businesses. They took a ton of time to setup and market initially, but now they generate a full-time income as I have a team in place to manage operations.

I love to work on them and often do, but I'll frequently take weeks off at a time to travel and everything continues to run smoothly. The entire business is based on the drop shipping model, so I don't have to stock any inventory and can run the business from anywhere. Plus, the initial capital outlay was just $1,500 so I didn't have to take on any risk.

For anyone interested, I blog about running my two businesses and eCommerce in general at:

http://www.ecommercefuel.com

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#105

Post by spiredigital »

sinak wrote: post #103

Two friends and I started http://repeaterstore.com straight out of college. Within a year it was profitable, and within 3 it was doing $3 million in revenue (and about a 15% profit margin). It's pretty much stabilized since then, and we hired a manager to monitor the operation. Most stock is shipped through drop shoppers, we just have 2 customer support people to handle phone calls and emails. Forthe last 2 years we'…

Totally agreed! Just left a comment above about how eCommerce is my favorite source of passive income.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#106

Post by [deleted] »

sinak wrote: post #103

Two friends and I started http://repeaterstore.com straight out of college. Within a year it was profitable, and within 3 it was doing $3 million in revenue (and about a 15% profit margin). It's pretty much stabilized since then, and we hired a manager to monitor the operation. Most stock is shipped through drop shoppers, we just have 2 customer support people to handle phone calls and emails. Forthe last 2 years we'…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#107

Post by ashray »

intended wrote: post #102
ashray wrote: post #97

I started a site 13 years ago and it is one of the largest sites in it's niche right now. Very very popular. I do work on it many hours a week (can range from 0 to 100 hours/week) but I don't really have to. I just love working on it, adding new features, etc. I would definitely call the work passive or hobbyist - even though sometimes I'm up till 4 in the morning working on X new feature. Income is in the early 5 di…

Hobbyist would be the better category for it. At a variable range of 0-100 hours a week, your top end is very far removed from the passive income part of the question. In this case the average number of hours per month may make more sense to discuss.

You're right. And maybe average number of hours per month is more appropriate. Or lets, say average number of hours per week. Usually the top end goes to 100 when I'm working on some new feature and am completely obsessed with it. However, following that there is definitely burn-out which causes me to go down to the 0-20 per week range.

Also, considering that I've been working on this since high school, I used to have a lot more time for it back then ;)

In a regular month I probably average around 20 hours per week. However, during a particularly overzealous month I may go to 35 or higher. I think at 20 it still falls under passive income.

Just to give you an idea of how my commitment varies. A year ago I had a full time job and I would sometimes work only 5-10 hours per week on it. Also, I completely neglected it in my first year of college (yet it paid for my college) and by my 3rd year there were enough problems that I had to again spend considerable time bringing it up to spec :)

I'd love to call it a hobby - because that's how I feel about it - but when 24 hours of downtime can cause more than a few hundred dollars of losses - it becomes tough not to take things a bit more seriously =/

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#108

Post by SiVal »

apike wrote: post #78
w1ntermute wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're practically giving that app away at $5. Wedding-related businesses are extremely high margin, simply because it's super easy to rip people off when they're really happy (same applies for funerals, except people are too sad to care in that case). You could probably sell this for 5x as much and still make more money - the bride will want everything to be perfect for the wedding and will be willing to spend whate…

Intuitively, I'd agree. When we release the upcoming major version (iPad support, advanced queueing, etc) I'd like to try $10. On the other hand, after 1.5 years at $5 we've been trying $2, and revenue has been consistently higher since the change. I suspect this is because it drove us into findable range in the "Top Paid Music" chart, but with no analytics it's frustratingly hard to prove.

Sorry for such a naive question, but is it possible to do A/B testing on the Apple App Store? I don't know what their turnaround time is for changes, but do you just change the price, wait a while, change back, wait a while, etc., or do you do something else?

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#109

Post by sprobertson »

pan69 wrote: post #99
sprobertson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passive income generally means that hours spent don't directly translate to dollars. All passive income solutions (that I know of) require some initial investment. Maybe "time-scalable income" would be a better term?

I understand that. But if you spend 80 hours per week on it, is it still "passive" or do you simply have two jobs? To me the idea of "passive" income is that you might spend a certain amount upfront but after that initial push it doesn't require a lot of attention, i.e. passive.

Well if he's spending that much time on it, then yeah I'd agree, not passive. In the interest of naming arbitrary cutoff points I'd call anything more than 10 hours a week not passive.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#110

Post by jarek »

brianwillis wrote: post #76
rjurney wrote: post #27

In California, selling cannibas to a co-op you belong to as a patient could be a nice supplemental income. An Aerogrow makes it easy, and with six legal plants, you can grow at least 1.5 pounds every 90 days. I think it works out that you can make $10-15k/year for not much work. And no, my wife would not let me do this :)

I think you win the prize for the most creative idea in this thread.

If true, that'd say more about the thread than about anything else.
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