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

Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 713 posts

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#21

Post by wfunction »

buf wrote: post #17
wfunction wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: how do index funds (or any kind of stock, really... in fact this question isn't really about index funds) "pull in the rest"? Do you actually manage to sell them when they're high and buy when they're low again? Or do you get stocks with dividends and just make money using the dividends? Obviously merely possessing stock of high value is kind of moot if it doesn't turn into cash somehow, so I'm curious how…

Sorry for the confusion. It's just a set it and forget it robo investment for now. I go in and adjust every quarter.

Ah, so no actual income then? Just stocks going up in value? As in, at some point you'd have to sell before you actually have any income from it, right?

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#23

Post by sigi45 »

austenallred wrote: post #11

I co-wrote a book on user acquisition and co-created an accompanying video course to climb out of debt left over from a failed startup. Made $104,000 in revenue since June (turns out the user acquisition stuff actually works), about 87k of which is profit, so we'll say ~$11,000/month part-time. It still makes me a solid $2,000/month now with zero work, and hopefully more once the book is officially published. (It's d…

Yeah thats exactly what you should do to promote something like this.

Tell anyone how much you made with your own tipps without proof/proof of your specific case and use it to sell it

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#24

Post by rjtobin »

sigi45 wrote: post #23
austenallred wrote: post #11

I co-wrote a book on user acquisition and co-created an accompanying video course to climb out of debt left over from a failed startup. Made $104,000 in revenue since June (turns out the user acquisition stuff actually works), about 87k of which is profit, so we'll say ~$11,000/month part-time. It still makes me a solid $2,000/month now with zero work, and hopefully more once the book is officially published. (It's d…

Yeah thats exactly what you should do to promote something like this. Tell anyone how much you made with your own tipps without proof/proof of your specific case and use it to sell it

Well, looks like it got $103k in crowd funding, so it's not totally unsubstantiated.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#25

Post by buf »

wfunction wrote: post #15
buf wrote: post #14

https://www.castingcall.club Social network for amateur voice actors. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/@buf/accidentally-built-a-successful-soci... Brings in about $2k/mo. p2p lending is hit or miss for me: 3-10% Index funds pull in the rest. I've also moved temporarily to a very cheap COL country so that I can focus on some more side projects to pull in extra sources of income before I return to the work fo…

Question: how do index funds (or any kind of stock, really... in fact this question isn't really about index funds) "pull in the rest"? Do you actually manage to sell them when they're high and buy when they're low again? Or do you get stocks with dividends and just make money using the dividends? Obviously merely possessing stock of high value is kind of moot if it doesn't turn into cash somehow, so I'm curious how…

To answer your other question (hn has a child-reply limit I think), it makes money on the dividends, which are reinvested back into the portfolio.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#26

Post by vladdanilov »

Optimage – a visually lossless image optimization tool

http://getoptimage.com

Released this week. Came unnoticed on HN but somehow got featured on PH. 1200+ downloads of free version and a few sales.

Not sure if that'll change. In that case, the best of 2016 will be one of the plugins for Sketch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319286.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#28

Post by refrigerator »

My brother and I have built a couple of test prep sites for UK medical school entrance exams: https://www.bmat.ninja, https://www.ukcat.ninja . BMAT Ninja made about $25k this year (up from $16k last year) and UKCAT about $10k.

Didn't do any work on marketing really so it is pretty much passive, but I think with a bit of work they could both do a lot better. It's a very seasonal market - we only get customers for about 3 months per year (the 3 months leading up to the exams), so thinking of branching out into other exams that occur during other times of the year so the income is a bit more steady.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#29

Post by rachelandrew »

I put my CSS Layout knowledge into an online course at:

https://thecssworkshop.com/

Interestingly it has been very popular with teams (so selling a set of licenses so a whole team of developers can use the material). I also teach the same material in person (either in-house or in open workshops) so I'm keeping the two in sync. I made some notes about that process on my blog: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/06/03/creating-an-e...

I intend to do a bit more marketing of both the in-person and online training in the new year.

As an independent (not working for a browser vendor) invited expert to the CSS Working Group, training and offering this course is really how I can fund doing that.

Post reply on HN