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Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

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Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#161

Post by jrajav »

curiouscats wrote: post #111
Vivtek wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My parents run a property management business and they generally charge $100 of rent after the first month. You have to have a pretty high mortgage or a pretty undesirable property (i.e. have to take low rent) for that to cut into your positive net; In other words, likely if it's a old property you can't get rid of, but unlikely if it's an investment property.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#162

Post by fendale »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #25

Our highest selling app (a hiking app) makes 15-30K/month, depending on the season. Our other navigation apps don't make quite as much yet, but some are getting there. You can figure out from my profile which it is, but I didn't want to name it in the thread and have this be something that turned up in searches. I wouldn't call it totally passive, but if we ignored it, it wouldn't stop making money. We have consisten…

I followed through your profile, and the hiking app looks very good. Great job!

How do you get 'outdoor maps' into the App, ie do you license them or are they available freely somewhere?

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#163

Post by dxrysom »

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'…

Well, It would be more awesome if your site was not "unable to select a database".

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#164

Post by ExcitedByNoise »

suresk wrote: post #58

I really like building developer tools and kind of miss doing it full time. I built a tool for testing/playing with REST services last year and sell it on the OS X app store: http://www.uresk.net/httpclient/ I'm not getting rich off it, but it usually brings in a few hundred bucks per month and I like hearing from fellow developers who benefit from using it.

I use this tool as well. Comes in handy. Any chance I can put in a feature request to reduce the minimum window size? About 960*600 would be perfect.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#165

Post by bravoyankee »

w1ntermute wrote: post #115
wikwocket wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

Regardless, A/B testing is not a panacea

Right. Deliver an outstanding product right from the beginning with your very best work. That's the strategy I use. A/B testing, while important, is often overstated.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#166

Post by bravoyankee »

w1ntermute wrote: post #71
kaptain wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are willing to pay a lot for wedding-related /services/. A lot of people that want to save money on a wedding would buy this because they DON'T want to pay for a wedding planner who will ensure that the music is 100% perfect. If you price this at $25, you'll lose that group of people that were looking to save money, (you could argue that at $25 it's still cheaper than a wedding planner). Not every bride is foo…

> you could argue that at $25 it's still cheaper than a wedding planner That's exactly my point, when your competition isn't even anywhere in the neighborhood, you might as well raise your prices. A bride-to-be isn't going to see a $25 wedding DJ app as being expensive; she's going to see it as being 1/10th of what an actual wedding DJ would cause. You said people are only willing to pay for wedding-related services…

Come on, lets be serious. Hardly anyone is going to pay $25 for an app they will use only once. And it's an app. Most people flinch at any price over $2.99.

Pricing it at $25 would be a disaster. You can bet the barn on that.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#168

Post by nirvana »

jfolkins wrote: post #128
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.

Folks, This is long, so I apologize in advance, bare with me. A 401k is NOT a safe investment. People constantly mistake prior history to future events yet there is no causality here. In fact, with QE3 in the wild, the value of your employer matched dollar continues to degrade. http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/2012... The question I ask myself is "What will my dollars be worth at the age of ret…

You reached the correct conclusions empirically, but you could have saved a lot of time and effort by having the philosophy that would lead you to them. Or more specifically, an understanding of economics. I don't mean this to sound smug, or anything like that, I'm just saying that I went thru the same process you did- only I did it in 1998! and then because I didn't believe it, again in 2001. By 2001 I knew there would be a housing bubble, even though there were (at that time) no signs of one. Hell, 911 was the news at that time.

Some pointers to help you be able to make these kinds of predictions (and thus maybe look for better data for more interesting and profitable investments)--

The book "The creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffen (?) is the history of money in america, the federal reserve, and the "bailout cycle" that happens over and over every 20 years. (And people act outraged at the "bailouts" in 2008, as if it hasn't happened dozens of times before.)

And "economics in one lesson" by henry hazlitt-- you can find a free copy of this out of copyright book online if you google around. A great overview of economics, starting from the premise of the broken window fallacy and how it illustrates why so many efforts that sound plausible totally fail (like keeping interest rates low and making banks loan money to people who can't repay - the Clinton and Bush policies that led to the housing bubble.)

Also the topical articles at http://mises.org are great and that site also has around 900 free economics books you can download.

I went the options-spreads on canadian junior mining companies route, and I got out of the market in the summer of 2007 when I felt the crash was imminent. (I was a year early, but for that kind of deal you don't worry about not nailing the absolute top!)

Spreads might be something good for you too-- "Options as a strategic investment", by McMillan is the bible. (Using spreads I get better returns at much less risk than people who buy stocks directly.)

Economics is a lot like programming- the basics are easy but there's no end to what you can learn, and it gives you such great power-- especially when the rest of the world has as much understanding of the science as the average person does of writing software-- essentially none. And, even better, the people who create economic opportunity for you telegraph what they are going to do years in advance- they campaign on it, even!

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