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Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

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Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#111

Post by curiouscats »

Vivtek wrote: post #101
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…

Or pay someone else to manage the property for you. They are not cheap but with the super low interest rates now (along with house purchase and rental markets) you can likely find some workable solutions this way. It isn't passive, but with a property manager it is much closer to passive.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#113

Post by apike »

SiVal wrote: post #108
apike wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The price updates within a day, and you get sales reports daily with a delay of a few hours, and a mix of old and new price sales on the first day. So it's possible, but the feedback loop of the charts means that this kind of measurement is hard to analyze. If you do a test that fares poorly, the next test will probably be affected by that.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#114

Post by apike »

interg12 wrote: post #87
apike wrote: post #18

Two years ago, when we started Steamclock, we spent our first two months building a niche iPhone app. We've done point releases but not added much, yet today it pays our rent. http://www.steamclocksw.com/weddingdj/ We haven't done any serious research or marketing for it. We simply focused down and built the highest quality app we could build, and it worked.

great app idea. Would you be offended if someone made a bar mitzvah version?

Of course not - we have competition already as a matter of fact. I'd be interested to know what would be different about it other than the marketing.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#115

Post by w1ntermute »

wikwocket wrote: post #94
hiddenfeatures wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question remains unanswered whether a "more professional" video would not have turned out cheesy. IMHO success proves Patrick right.

> IMHO success proves Patrick right. Actually, A/B tests prove him right. Or occasionally wrong! But that's the point of such testing. He mentioned he has an A/B test going between video/no-video. I imagine that, if the video version wins, he could consider testing 2 different videos (time and expense permitting).

The page on which Patrick is A/B testing the presence of video is https://training.kalzumeus.com/lifecycle-emails, and not https://training.kalzumeus.com/ (note they have 2 different videos)

You can see the A/B testing in action by visiting these two links, which explicitly include/exclude the video, on the first link:

https://training.kalzumeus.com/lifecycle-emails?video=no

https://training.kalzumeus.com/lifecycle-emails?video=yes

Regardless, A/B testing is not a panacea[0]. Is it a good technique? Sure, in many situations. But just like with anything else, you have to take it with a grain of salt.

0: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/07/groundhog-day-or-th...

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#116

Post by jrockway »

saryant wrote: post #69
jfolkins wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I support the idea of paying off debt. 401k (investment groups) however, is essentially giving your money to a gambler, and having him play your hand. Bet on yourself. Always.

In regards to the 401k, I disagree. Unless your employer only offers really crappy funds it's in no way gambling. First off, your employer match is essentially free money. It's foolish to ignore that. The tax benefits can also be significant. For instance, I contribute 25% of my pre-tax salary to my 401k. That works out to $1500 a month but because my taxable income is lowered my monthly net is only decreased by abou…

Indeed. With a historical performance of 9% a year returns and a 100% employer match, you'd have to be pretty pessimistic about the future of the economy to not have a 401k. (Though one could argue that taxes will be higher in the future, and so paying taxes now might be better than paying taxes when you take the distribution.)

You don't even have to manage the split yourself, there are plenty of mutual funds that target certain retirement year changes and rebalance the portfolio as appropriate (basically: less risky investments as your retirement date nears). There are fees for this, of course, but for my fund they amount to $90 per 10 years per $10,000 invested. I think that's worth it if you don't want to actively manage your retirement portfolio.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#117

Post by redthrowaway »

EGreg wrote: post #26
bigethan wrote: post #4

Airbnb. High value customers and very little overhead on my part. Not totally passive, I guess, but takes up very little time and makes us a decent bit of money on the side.

Could you disclose how much one can make on airbnb? I have a 2 bedroom apartment and sometimes, when I leave on vacation, I would like to rent it out.

Easiest way to figure that out is to check what's available in your area on Airbnb and see what equivalent places are going for.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#118

Post by EvRev »

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 :)

That is not passive at all. You have to change the res every two weeks, plus be on the look out for any signs of stress (bugs, nutrients, and environment).

Then you have to process it, which a pound can be trimmed by a professional in about 10 hours. BTW you need to supervise them or do it yourself.

Then you get the hassle of dealing with the clubs consignment drama... Not to mention the stress of worrying about being robbed throughout the whole cycle.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#119

Post by kcorey »

I make lower 5 digits per year from http://docrobot.co.uk.

It's effectively an online desktop publishing system aimed at making it easy for HR teams to deliver TRS (Total Reward Statements) in 10% of the time, at 10% of the cost, and with fewer errors.

It took a couple years to write, so I wouldn't say it was an easy investment, but it was fun to write. These days it ticks over and I don't spend much time on it at all.

Perhaps I should work on advertising more...

-Ken

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#120

Post by curiouscats »

nlh wrote: post #96
hkhanna wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State and municipality bonds are sort of like U.S. Treasury bonds, except they're issued by a state or local government. They pay a fixed interest rate, but your interest is usually tax-free. Of course, they pay a lower interest rate than taxable bonds. Thus, the only reason these tax-free bonds would be better than taxable bonds is if you are in a high enough marginal tax bracket to compensate for the difference in…

Excellent explanation - thank you for the write-up! Now if only we could find those muni bonds that pay 8% ;)

True. Just wait, it will happen eventually. But until then, sadly, decent income producing investments (bonds and the like) are not easy to find.
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