Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 180 posts

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#121

Post by noAlchemy »

anty wrote: post #102
noAlchemy wrote: post #79

How's your maths? Here's something I'd pay quite a lot for: intelligent inventory optimisation in an easy to use SaaS format. Quite mathematically intensive to do well, so most SMEs don't have the skills, but directly saves money so has a clear value proposition. Some pointers for an MVP I think might be sensible: Model stock arrival and product ordering as Poisson point process with probability based on recent data…

There seems to be a lot of competition in this field. Did you evaluate existing services? It's an interesting problem.

I've had a look (but not intensively, it's a back-burner thing for me at the moment). Everything seems very heavyweight and aimed at big businesses with long supply chains.

For a small ecommerce retailer, you don't want much like that; maybe I've missed it but there seems to be a gap for the Basecamp of this niche. A shopify plugin might be a good way to get standardised i/o rather than adapting to proprietary systems

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#122

Post by ValentineC »

drewcrawford wrote: post #81
marme wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the first one you describe is exactly what you can do on outlook. Everyone who is connected to the same exchange server can view everyone elses calendar and see which times they are free and which times they already have meetings scheduled and then they can send a meeting request at a time that everyone is and it is automatically added to your calendar unless you reject it. The only problem with this is that outside…

> The only problem with this is that outside clients wont have access to you exchange server. My company consists of: me and the guy sitting a few feet from me. If I wanted to schedule a meeting with that person, Exchange would be a poor improvement on the existing solution of turning my head.

Google Calendar has a 'show free/busy' option to show your availability but not your appointments, and do auto-accept for requests too.

What tool are you using right now? Google Calendar's fine for me at the moment but I'm always looking for options.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#123

Post by jbrooksuk »

bulatb wrote: post #107
jbrooksuk wrote: post #46

I've also been thinking of the exact same thing myself, something which will generate enough profit to pay off bills, buy something nice and invest a little in growing the idea. Recently I've been working on https://www.emlipo.com which was scrutinized by HN for essentially being "little code nobody would pay for". So I've not really wanted to work on that now. Still, there will be something out there I'm sure. By th…

That semicolon (;) in your footer should be a colon (:). [0] [0] http://i.imgur.com/VHYGbSd.png

Good spot! I hate bad Grammar too!

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#124

Post by ValentineC »

jasonkester wrote: post #104
h2s wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people say they want "passive income", I take it to mean "I want to start a tiny business and then neglect it and hope it dies slowly".

In my experience, tiny SaaS businesses tend to grow when neglected, rather than die. Once a product is good enough for people to start signing up for and using, it often doesn't require much more development work. As long as people can find it, more people will sign up than cancel in any given month. "Passive" is a really good way to describe the experience of owning one of these little businesses, once you've dialed…

> In my experience, tiny SaaS businesses tend to grow when neglected, rather than die.

Just curious: what if a new competitor moves in? Or is does that not happen often?

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#125

Post by captainbenises »

scw wrote: post #78

A service I'd pay for: Mailing list management that doesn't suck, and isn't Google Groups. Something that can be backed up, and has a web interface. Mailman is still king in this niche, and I'm not entirely sure why.

This is a good idea, surely someone has already made a good mailing list tool?

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#126

Post by kp27 »

patio11 wrote: post #71

Some options: 1) Do you have freelancing or other experience which has exposed you to multiple people with similar problems? For example, have you implemented the same "$()#% authentication system for a web application 20 times? Package up that one little piece of the puzzle into a scalable way to teach people to do it without needing to have you or someone similarly skilled on their team. Common form factors include…

2 Q's:

1. "Find or create one proprietary data source"

Any other examples & how do you monetize on this?

2. "you want passive options but more active options, like selling consulting, are things that might well fit"

You're doing a great job at it looking at your year in review, but don't you need an established name with years of blog/material to get these sorts of rates?

Thank you!

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#127

Post by robryan »

davidjgraph wrote: post #52

I hate to be the cynic (lies), but there's no such thing as a "passive income". The moment you put your service online you'll have active maintenance and support, even if you don't charge for it. The other problem is that if you solve a problem well, it's actually extremely hard to avoid the business scaling. Once the revenue goes past 1k/month, it'll carry on going, and few people can bring themselves to remove purc…

Also if you are picking an area with competition it is very hard to stand still and collect your $1000/ month, either your pushing on to something bigger or your $1000/ month starts declining pretty fast.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#128

Post by euroclydon »

patio11 wrote: post #71

Some options: 1) Do you have freelancing or other experience which has exposed you to multiple people with similar problems? For example, have you implemented the same "$()#% authentication system for a web application 20 times? Package up that one little piece of the puzzle into a scalable way to teach people to do it without needing to have you or someone similarly skilled on their team. Common form factors include…

It's worth noting that Bingo Card Creator is very amenable to organic SEO. Not only that, but the process of SEO actually expands the product offering at the same time. That's the beauty of it. Creating a new bingo card is as simple as pasting a bunch of related words into a form and maybe a description paragraph, but now you have a new page full of words (hello Google) and you've increased the real value of the product to some customers and the perceived value to many more.

I think it would be challenging to duplicate Patrick's extremely low-cost and synergistic SEO strategy with a SAAS offering that was not so text-centric.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#129

Post by patio11 »

euroclydon wrote: post #128
patio11 wrote: post #71

Some options: 1) Do you have freelancing or other experience which has exposed you to multiple people with similar problems? For example, have you implemented the same "$()#% authentication system for a web application 20 times? Package up that one little piece of the puzzle into a scalable way to teach people to do it without needing to have you or someone similarly skilled on their team. Common form factors include…

It's worth noting that Bingo Card Creator is very amenable to organic SEO. Not only that, but the process of SEO actually expands the product offering at the same time. That's the beauty of it. Creating a new bingo card is as simple as pasting a bunch of related words into a form and maybe a description paragraph, but now you have a new page full of words (hello Google) and you've increased the real value of the prod…

I think it would be challenging to duplicate Patrick's extremely low-cost and synergistic SEO strategy with a SAAS offering that was not so text-centric.

Many people have reported to me that variations on it have worked out quite well for them. I mean, yes, you might spend 10X or 100X what BCC does on content creation (~$3k over 8 years), but that's very justifiable for a lot of SaaS businesses.

Other people report to me that they've had substantial success with similar strategies in SaaS.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#130

Post by mixmixmix »

thenomad wrote: post #118
dangero wrote: post #112

Pick an app on the iPhone that is currently selling well and you feel you could build, then make a competing app. It's boring, but it works and it's a good confidence builder. A lot of the advice in this thread is to build some cool new tech, but I'm gonna say that's a bad idea because it's very risky to do that. Sounds like you're trying to find a reliable way to make money. Also, online offerings will need constant…

YES. New = risky. Risky = bad if you're just looking for income. One of the biggest lightbulb moments I ever had in online business was when I realised that if I saw a whole bunch of competitors in a given niche, that meant there was definitely profit to be made there .

Got any other "light bulb" moments to share?
Post reply on HN